“I just feel like the whole thing is bizarre,” Crystal Sutton told Dateline. “Him leaving and staying away from home — that never happened.”
Crystal’s brother, Vincent Sutton, hasn’t been home for nearly a year. The 43-year-old vanished on September 14, 2023, in California City, California.
His family has been searching for him ever since. “You have siblings that you have been with your whole life. There’s no way you could walk away from us,” Crystal said.
Life began for the siblings in Los Angeles. Vincent is the eldest of five. “He played football, he ran track,” Crystal said. “Very giving. Loved animals.”
Crystal says she and her siblings had a normal childhood — sports, hanging with friends, walks around the neighborhood. Around age 16, though, something changed within Vincent. “The first thing that we got about him having a disability was that he walked out one day and said he was going to the store, and he never came back,” she said.
Crystal says her brother ended up in jail that night and then a mental health facility. He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.
According to Crystal, Vincent’s symptoms worsened into adulthood, causing him to rarely speak or leave the house he shares with his father. “He completely shut down. He don’t talk. He don’t come out the room,” she said. “He prefers to read the Bible. Give him some coffee, some water, and just let him be.”
Vincent has a 19-year-old daughter with his ex-wife. She told Dateline her father’s issues make her cherish the little moments even more. “One time when I came to visit, we were coloring together and he was telling me his favorite character was Daffy Duck,” she recalled. “It’s nice when we did have conversations like that.”
On September 13, Crystal Sutton and her sister, Delana Sutton-Wiggins, got concerning calls from their father: Vincent was having an episode.
Crystal said she went to check on Vincent the next day at their father’s house in California City. “When I got there, [Vincent] was leaving. He was walking down the dirt road,” she said.
Crystal says she asked her brother where he was going and he said he was going to church. “I said, ‘OK, you going to the church, come right back,’” she recalled.
Vincent came back, but returned without shoes. He had also become nonverbal. Crystal started to get concerned and called the police. “I’m calling the police and I’m asking for help and they just like, ‘There’s nothing we can do,’” she said.
Crystal told Dateline that since Vincent’s behavior wasn’t viewed as harmful to himself or others, the police told them their hands were tied.
Crystal continued to worry about her brother after she got back to her own home. That night, her phone rang. “My dad called and was like, ‘Um, you know, your brother walked out and I can’t find him,’” she recalled. “My dad kept saying, ‘It’s nighttime, he don’t go out at nighttime.’”
Crystal and her siblings knew that to be true, but told their father to wait and see if Vincent returned in the morning.
Vincent did not return the next morning. His family reported him missing.
The California City Police Department is investigating Vincent’s case. On September 23, 2023, NBC affiliate KGET reported that the California City Police Department was seeking the community’s help to find him.
The report also states that Vincent is “nonviolent and friendly.”
Vincent is also listed in the state of California’s missing persons database.
The family told Dateline they have searched for Vincent on their own. “I’ve driven to LA County, San Bernardino County,” Crystal said. “We drove all around Cal City. We looked through abandoned houses. We looked all through the lake. We looked everywhere.”
They found no sign of Vincent, which Crystal finds strange. “Everybody knows everybody so it just doesn’t add up in my opinion,” she said. “Nobody saw him walk down the street. Nobody saw him walk past their house. Nobody saw a camera, caught something?”
She’s hoping the police will do more to find out what happened to her brother. “When those two little boys went missing it was millions of police out there. They were coming from all different counties to search the desert,” she said, referring to brothers Orrin and Orson West, who vanished from California City in 2020. “So why, when my brother with mental health goes missing, I don’t see one officer?”
Dateline reached out to CCPD for a response and to get the latest information on the investigation but has not yet heard back.
Looking for Vincent has taken a toll on the family, his sisters say. “It’s just a weight that’s just there,” Delana Sutton-Wiggins said. “You can’t not think about it. You can’t just put it to the side. It’s there in front of you every day.”
They are hoping that one day, that weight will be lifted. “We miss him, and we want him to come back home,” Crystal Sutton said.
The family is offering a $3,200 reward to the person who finds Vincent.
Vincent is 6’2” and 150 lbs. He was last seen wearing a brown plaid shirt and blue jeans.
Anyone with information on Vincent’s disappearance is asked to call the California City Police Department at 760-373-8606.
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