“He’s never been gone this long — ever,” Kimberly Braddy told Dateline of her missing son.
Timothy “TJ” Braddy, 34, was last heard from on December 10, 2022. “The leads have just been very dry,” Kimberly said.
She told Dateline that she raised her three children all over the United States. Timothy is the middle child. “[My husband] is a union electrician, recently retired, and we traveled,” she said. “We traveled in a 32-foot Holiday Rambler, and I home-schooled all the kids. And it was a known fact that in every state that we went into, we would go to a capital, and the kids had to write an essay about the capital.”
The family eventually settled in Bonifay, Florida. There, Kimberly said, Timothy had his children. “He has six kids. His oldest is 17, his youngest is 2,” Kimberly told Dateline. Timothy is no longer with either mothers, but the kids live near Kimberly and her husband.
“He likes to swim, he’s a fabulous artist, he can draw anything, and he loves his kids,” Kimberly said. “Just a real fun guy to be around.”
About three years ago, Timothy moved to Oregon for work. “He worked as a horizontal driller,” she said. “He did drilling from Washington State all the way out to Wyoming.”
Kimberly told Dateline she last saw her son in December 2022 when he drove to Florida from Oregon for an exciting job opportunity. “It was supposed to be a 10-year hit and he was excited when he came over to the house on the 5th,” she recalled. “He kept saying, you know, ‘Man, I’m going to be here close to the house. I’ll be able to come over and see the babies and spend time with them.’”
But Timothy never started that job.
Kimberly told Dateline she was texting her son on December 9. She said he was on his way to Tampa for the onboarding of his new job. “He was supposed to go there and fill out all his paperwork and then go to the job which was supposed to be in Lakeland,” she said. “When he contacted me on the 9th, he was all, ‘My GPS, my GPS.’ I thought that maybe he just hadn’t gotten his bearings.”
But it was much more serious than that.
Kimberly said she grew worried when Timothy’s fiancée, who lives in Oregon, contacted her the next day. “She contacted us and said, ‘You know, I haven’t heard from TJ in a little bit.’ And then by the 11th, it was really a panic because then we didn’t know where he was -- and that’s why we made the police report.”
According to Kimberly, Timothy’s fiancée reported him missing to the Grants Pass Police Department in Oregon on December 11.
Dateline reached out to the Grants Pass Police Department for an update on the status of the case, but has yet to receive a response.
On December 14, Timothy’s red Dodge pickup truck bearing an Oregon tag was found abandoned in Hernando County, Florida. According to a Facebook post from the Hernando County Sheriff’s Office, it was located on the northbound side of Commercial Way near Weeki Wachee High School.
Dateline spoke with Deputy Public Information Officer Michael Terry with the Hernando County Sheriff’s Office. He said that on December 13, his office received a notice about an abandoned vehicle. “We red-tagged his vehicle — giving the owner time to come and get their vehicle before we have it towed away,” he said. “And then once we learned that information about him being a missing person out of Grants Pass, we went back there and started to do the search.”
The post from the sheriff’s office notes that “upon the discovery of Braddy’s vehicle, the Sheriff’s Office utilized its Aviation Unit as well as the Drone Unit in attempts to locate Braddy,” which “yielded negative results.”
According to the post, the HCSO launched an investigation and discovered that Braddy last spoke to family on December 9 into the early morning hours of December 10. “It was also learned during this conversation, Braddy made several irrational/paranoid statements, and was running into the woods,” the post states. “It was soon learned that Braddy had possibly relapsed, and was becoming paranoid, therefore left his vehicle behind.”
Kimberly Braddy told Dateline that her son had struggled with drug use but had been clean for several months prior to his disappearance. “According to what I was hearing — he had been clean for three to six months,” she said.
Investigators learned that Timothy was last physically sighted by residents in Citrus County, Florida on December 10 near the area of W. Ponce De Leon Boulevard (U.S. 98), the post says. It was about 14 minutes from where his car was later found abandoned in Hernando County. That area was searched as well but there was no sign of Timothy.
“It’s not an active investigation for us,” Officer Terry told Dateline, explaining that the missing person’s report was taken out of Grants Pass in Oregon. “We decided to go ahead and see if we could locate him in our county, so we did that pretty extensively for a few days. We could never locate him.”
A few days after her son’s disappearance, Kimberly reached out to the non-profit organization called ‘We Are The Essentials.’ Dateline spoke with the non-profit’s president, Nico Tusdoni. “We had first started out looking for Brian Laundrie, the guy that murdered Gabby Petito. And while we were helping with that case, a bunch of us started hearing about a lot of missing persons in the Tampa Bay area,” he said.
Tusdoni told Dateline that his organization investigated Timothy’s case heavily for several months. He said a couple last saw Timothy walking southeast on Highway 98 in Citrus County and “he was never to be seen or heard from again.”
“We’ve conducted -- over five months -- ground searches, aerial searches with drones, canine cadaver dogs. We had something like over 540 linear miles on foot searching all up and down U.S. 98,” he said.
Although Tusdoni said he isn’t exactly sure what happened, he said he is suspicious of an area where the dogs lost Timothy’s scent near U.S. 98. “Something happened at that driveway, especially since his scent just disappeared,” he said.
Whatever happened to Timothy, his mother told Dateline the family won’t give up searching for him. She runs the ‘Bring Timothy Braddy Home’ Facebook page hoping someone will come forward with a lead on her son’s case.
“I’m hoping, I really am,” Kimberly said of the possibility of finding her son alive. “It’s like [my husband] and I say, ‘Until it’s confirmed — he’s alive.’”
Timothy is 6’1,” 175 lbs., with auburn hair and a thin build. He has multiple tattoos and, according to his mother, a magnificent smile.
Anyone with information about Timothy’s disappearance is asked to call the Grants Pass Police Department at (541) 450-6260 or Nico Tusdoni at 516-253-0610.