Last August, Levi Blake left his senior-living apartment in North Omaha.
He never returned home.
Since Blake, an 80-year-old man with dementia, went missing Aug. 17, 2023, family, friends and Omaha Police Department officers have extensively searched for him. Blake was described as 5-foot-9 and 150 pounds.
In November, three months after Blake disappeared, Police Sgt. Brett Schrage, Blake’s son Terrance Collier, and family friend and North Omaha community activist Sherman Wells to urge the public to help in the search. Blake’s daughter, LaShonda Richardson, has been involved in helping find her father.
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In March, police offered $5,000 to anyone who gives information leading to finding Blake. At least $15,000 has been raised so far to find Blake, Wells said.
All those efforts have not produced substantial leads.
“The number of tips we’ve gotten from anything could probably be counted on one hand,†said Schrage, the lead investigator into Blake’s disappearance.
Police initially believed Blake boarded a city bus near North 33rd and Lake Streets and got off somewhere else in the city. While the possibility of him getting on a bus hasn’t been ruled out, police now believe it’s more likely Blake may have wandered on foot about a half-mile northeast from his senior apartment and then disappeared.
Police said they came to that conclusion after seeing video footage, including footage from a Ring video doorbell, of a man matching Blake’s description.
Police: ‘It’s not an easy case’
August was not the first time Blake has wandered off, Wells said.
In one instance, Wells said, Blake was found outside a hotel in Carter Lake giving away his money. In another instance, Blake was spotted by a woman around 36th Street and Grand Avenue. Wells said the woman observed Blake had no shoes on. Blake told the woman, according to Wells, that he was from Chicago and looking for his son and daughter.
After the woman requested to see Blake’s identification card and saw his name, she called the police. Police arrived and took Blake home.
Blake most recently lived in an apartment at the JC Wade Senior Villa complex at North 34th Avenue and Ohio Street. No footage exists of him leaving his apartment the day he went missing.
Police have said the Ring video doorbell camera from another residence shows Blake walking northeast along the street away from his apartment. The Ring video was taken at 4:40 p.m. Aug. 17.
Nearly an hour later, at 5:33 p.m., a grainy video shows a man who appeared to match Blake’s description walk along John A. Creighton Boulevard near the Adams Park Community Center, police said. The man follows the boulevard’s curve toward Bedford Avenue before he disappears from the camera’s view.
At some point, Blake also was seen wandering near a stop sign close to his apartment building at 34th Avenue and Miami Street, Schrage said.
Police said the video’s grainy quality makes it virtually impossible to definitively say the man in the video was Blake.
Police believe Blake was not carrying a cellphone, or any electronics, at the time of his disappearance.
Those factors have made for a difficult investigation, Schrage said.
“It’s not an easy case,†he said. “In other missing persons cases, there could be a train of thought. There’s some type of communication. There could be cellular devices. … We don’t have any of that. It’s tough to know what his mindset would have been at that point in time.â€
Blake, who suffered from other health problems in addition to dementia, spent most of his adult life in Omaha, Terrance Collier said. Blake was born in Mississippi and grew up in Chicago. In Omaha, Blake worked as a jitney — essentially a taxicab — driver. He also worked in auto detailing, Collier said.
While Collier said Blake had many friends, he spent a lot of time alone at home.
“He’s a people person. But at the same time, he does like his privacy,†Collier said. “You’d have to know him in order to know what he’s like. For me, I can say he’s a multifaceted person.â€
Blake’s dementia could make Blake ornery, Wells said.
Citing experiences from Blake’s family members, Wells said, “There were times when he would get up and be like, ‘Who are you? What are you doing in my house?’ He’d get angry with them because he forgot who they were.â€
Even though Wells said Blake visited Chicago a lot, he and Collier don’t believe Blake has left Omaha. Collier said he saw his father’s house keys, wallet and bank cards at the apartment days after Blake disappeared.
Friends and family doubt intensity of police search.
Wells and Collier also question the Police Department’s initial intensity in searching for Blake, although they both praised Schrage once the sergeant came on the case. Collier said he found out about his father’s disappearance from his mother and sister. Collier added that police didn’t inform him until four days after his father disappeared.
Wells said police didn’t tell the community Blake was missing until 10 days after the fact. He said he and a group of about 40 people made a video and sent it to police to start looking into Blake’s disappearance more seriously. He also questioned why the police didn’t send out an alert sooner on Blake’s disappearance.
According to Bonacci, however, police filed a 72-hour endangering missing advisory in conjunction with the Nebraska State Patrol on Aug. 18. Because missing persons detectives don’t typically work weekends unless they’re paid for overtime, Bonacci said, they didn’t see the report on Blake until Monday.
After the advisory expired, Bonacci said he pushed information on Blake’s disappearance to traditional and social media to ask the public’s help in finding Blake.
Even before the information was pushed out through the media channels, Bonacci said officers made extensive efforts to find Blake.
“I can guarantee you those officers … looked for him. There was an effort to find him,†Bonacci said.
Bonacci and Schrage said OPD has deployed extensive resources in the search for Blake. Those include bringing in bloodhounds from Cook County, Illinois, to sniff for traces of Blake and using drones as officers continue to thoroughly comb through areas where Blake frequently was most recently seen. Bonacci said police have even looked at missing persons reported in other states that had similar descriptions to Blake.
Wells said he believes Blake’s race — he is Black — played a role in the search.
“I just think that if he were a White man, the search efforts would have been more intense,†he said.
Bonacci denied that race played any factor. He added that Blake’s disappearance was the first time the Omaha police had offered a reward for help in locating a missing person in his three years as a police spokesperson.
“We do not feel race played any role in our response to the investigation,†Bonacci said. “We’ve put a lot of hours and lots of resources into this. This is important to us.â€
The longer Blake remains missing, the more pessimistic Collier is about his father’s fate. Blake, who was described as generally wearing slacks and T-shirts, disappeared days before high temperatures reached the 100s and months before extremely cold weather afflicted the area.
“There’s a huge possibility that he’s no longer amongst (us) as a living, breathing human being,†Collier said.
In the wake of his father’s disappearance, Collier said he is forming the Levi Blake Foundation to help raise funds to find other missing Omahans and return them home to their loved ones.
While Schrage and police have taken investigatory steps — including collecting DNA samples — in case Blake’s body is found, officers are continuing to search for him under the premise that he’s still alive.
“It’s still our job as the Omaha Police Department to do our due diligence to continue investigating this until we find him or determine a reason for us to close this case,†Bonacci said. “At this point, it’s still very much open.â€