GONE OFF THE GRID

In December, a fervent nationwide search for Hannah Kobayashi ended a 30-year-old named declared that she wasn't abruptly after police a missing person at all. The internet sleuths weren't satisfied.

- Jennifer Swann

ON THE AFTERNOON of December 2, 2024, Jess Chou, a radio-advertising executive in Honolulu, sat at her computer waiting for the livestream of a Los Angeles Police Department press conference. The police were scheduled to give an update on the case of Hannah Kobayashi, a 30-year-old Maui woman who vanished three days after missing her connecting flight from LAX to JFK on November 8. Just before Kobayashi's phone went dead, she sent friends and family a series of strange texts. She said she'd been "hacked" and "stripped of my identity"; when asked to explain, she said, "I got tricked pretty much into giving away all my funds. For someone I thought I loved. I've been on the streets." The messages, Kobayashi's family said, didn't sound like her, and Chou feared that she had been drugged, abducted, trafficked.

Chou didn't know Kobayashi-she had learned about the case on the local news a few days after she was reported missing. But Chou saw parts of herself in her: a woman in her 30s who lived in Hawaii and liked to wander. "I thought, Shoot, I travel a lot. What should I be looking out for?" Chou says. Curiosity soon turned into obsession. She stayed up past midnight reading news articles and joined a private Facebook group comprising hundreds of people in L.A. who strategized about where to look for Kobayashi, checking off each location on a custom Google map of the city. The group's members took shifts monitoring webcams of Skid Row, installed by a downtown L.A. shelter, where some thought Kobayashi might be staying; Chou watched for hours.