His Mom Saw Him Ride Off On A Jet Ski In Aruba With An Older Man, And Then He Vanished
In May 2004, Yvonne DeVries took her 14-year-old son, Max, and her 12-year-old daughter, Dominique, on a family vacation to Aruba. The trip was supposed to be healing for the trio, who were all still grieving the sudden loss of Yvonne’s husband.
Instead, while at the resort, Max was befriended by a father-son duo from Illinois and ultimately disappeared. To this day, his whereabouts remain unknown.
Yvonne, Max, and Dominique stayed at the La Cabana resort, and just a few days into their travels, Max was approached by a man in his thirties while playing pool.
They proceeded to play together, and eventually, Max learned the man was on vacation with his adoptive father to celebrate his adoption anniversary.
Max later met the man’s father, who asked what plans he had for the following day. Yvonne revealed they all intended to go parasailing, and when the man and his father asked to join, she agreed.
Parasailing went off without a hitch the following day, and Max reportedly went jet-skiing with the man. By the end of the day, the DeVries family and the father-son duo went their separate ways.
That was until the next day when the man’s father spoke to Max again and asked whether he’d be interested in going jet-skiing. According to Yvonne, her son was thrilled about the idea.
“Max was jumping up and down really excited, [saying], ‘Let me go, let me go!’ And I did,” she recalled.
Yvonne and Dominique stayed behind as Max rode away with the man’s 56-year-old father. Max was never seen or heard from again.
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The pair of jet skis were only rented out for 45 minutes, and after an hour passed, Yvonne got a bad feeling.
“There’s that moment when you’re just like it’s been too long. Something is not right,” she detailed.
She ended up speaking with hotel staff, telling them her son was missing and that he was last seen with the older man. Staff members visited the men’s room, but upon knocking on their door, there was no answer.
The police were subsequently contacted, and a rescue boat was deployed to look for Max. Yet, the rescue boat returned to shore with just one person in tow: the man’s father. Max was nowhere to be found.
The man’s son turned up on the beach around the same time, and when confronted by Yvonne, he claimed to have been asleep in his room as the whole ordeal unfolded.
What’s most puzzling is how the man’s father arrived with scratches covering his face, arms, and neck, and when questioned by the police, his story kept changing. First, he stated Max’s jet ski had stopped working, so he attempted to tow it and wound up stranding both watercraft.
Then, the man’s father alleged Max had slipped away from him in the ocean. Finally, the timeline of events changed again, with the man’s father claiming to have spotted Max swimming to shore.
These glaring inconsistencies still didn’t lead to any arrests in Max’s case, though, and following a few days of searching for Max, authorities in Aruba put out a statement. They said the 14-year-old was lost at sea following a tragic accident.
Yvonne returned home without her son, but she refused to give up looking for him. She got help from a now-retired detective named Cory Williams, who unearthed shocking details about the father-son pair’s past.
“So I made a phone call to check on the backgrounds of both of these men, and within minutes, I got a response: one of the statements given by the younger man. He told the police in 1981 he had been a victim of his dad for crimes against children,” Cory said.
It was also discovered that, while in Aruba, the younger man had told authorities that his father had never been arrested.
The FBI briefly investigated Max’s case, even questioning the younger man at one point. He denied having any involvement in foul play and maintained that whatever happened to Max was a tragic accident.
“For a little boy who was lost and taken from his sister, his family, for all those who loved and missed him, to not even still have a death certificate for this day. I want the follow-through that he never got from the very beginning,” Yvonne explained.
“There’s been nothing other than a little boy lost at sea. And that’s not what it was. Was he abducted? Was he sold? Was he [assaulted] and killed on the water? Something happened, and I just want to know what happened. I just have that limbo of wondering what happened to Max that day.”
In April 2016, Yvonne reportedly received a message from a woman on Facebook that seemed to implicate the two men further. The woman said she’d dated the younger man for one year, and Max had come up in conversation.
The man’s father supposedly asked the woman if his son had ever mentioned anything about “the 14-year-old boy who went missing in Aruba.”
The woman had no clue what he was talking about, and when she later asked her boyfriend for more information, he reportedly became angry and told her never to mention Max again.
The woman soon noticed how her boyfriend’s father seemed to behave inappropriately around her own son and broke up with her boyfriend shortly afterward.
Following their split, she also searched online for the “missing boy in Aruba,” discovered Max’s case, and reached out to Yvonne.
Yvonne heard from another woman who reportedly dated the younger man as well. That woman alleged he would say Max’s name in his sleep and once stated his father had gotten him “out of trouble in Aruba.”
When the woman confronted the younger man and asked who Max was, he allegedly became enraged, held her at gunpoint, and assaulted her. The woman survived, and the younger man reportedly served two years of probation.
Nonetheless, no further discoveries regarding Max’s disappearance have been made. No one has been charged in relation to his case, which is still unsolved over 20 years later.
Yvonne, who created a website and a Facebook group dedicated to her son following his disappearance, hopes the FBI will reopen their investigation.
“There was an FBI file with an active number. If they can just reactivate that number and get the case activated again, that’s all we need. I just want to know. At this point, nothing’s going to bring him back. But it’s time to give that little boy some justice,” she said.
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