She Was Buried Without A Throat | True Crime Documentary
At 3:00 in the morning, 17-year-old Haley Busby quietly walks out of her own home. She leaves behind a note asking her parents not to look for her. A security camera captures her getting into a dark SUV and then she’s gone. When her family calls the police, everything looks like a typical teenage runaway case.
There are no signs of forced entry. No evidence of a struggle. Her bag is packed. The note is written in her own handwriting. Investigators classify the case as a runaway and no Amber Alert is issued. But it doesn’t take long before they realize that note wasn’t the result of a sudden decision. For nearly a year, Haley had been communicating online with a 39-year-old man.
They first met through online gaming, then moved their conversations to Discord and eventually to an encrypted messaging app where messages disappear without a trace. The man admits that he was the one who picked Haley up that night. Later, he claims he dropped her off alive on the side of a road in Ohio. Detectives investigate his story, but it quickly starts falling apart.
Phone data reveals a completely different route. Search warrants uncover even more evidence. And during a uh a follow-up interview, he answers one question in a way that completely changes the direction of the investigation. Even as he insists he knows nothing about what happened to Haley, investigators are already examining data recovered from a device he never had the chance to wipe clean.
And that’s where they uncover the evidence that leads to a far more disturbing question. What really happened after Haley got into his vehicle? Hey guys, let me grab you for just a second. I’m really curious where my audience is watching from. So, I’d love for you to drop a comment and tell me what city you’re in and what time it is for you right now.
Thanks for taking a moment. Go ahead and share that in the comments. And now, let’s keep going. In January of 2026, 17-year-old Haley Busby disappeared from her home in Fischers, Indiana. At first, everything pointed to what looked like a typical teenage runaway case. There were no signs of a struggle inside the house. The locks hadn’t been forced, and the windows were untouched.
Haley had left behind a note, packed her belongings, and walked out on her own. Because of that, investigators initially believed she had simply run away. But it wasn’t long before they realized Haley may not have acted alone. Before she disappeared, she had been communicating online with a man she had met over the internet.
Today, the FBI executed a search warrant at a home in Victorian Village connected to the suspect in her disappearance. 39-year-old Tyler Thomas is the suspect in the disappearance of 17-year-old Haley Busby. His name was Tyler Thomas. He was 39 years old. Haley was just 17. According to investigators, the two first met through an online game.
Thomas admitted that he drove to Haley’s house and picked her up, but he claimed he later dropped her off alive on the side of a road in Ohio. Detectives carefully investigated that version of events and it simply didn’t hold up. Investigators determined that after Haley disappeared, she and Thomas stayed together at a short-term rental property.
They then examined his phone, and what they found completely changed the course of the investigation. This was no longer the story of a teenager who packed a bag and ran away from home. It had become the story of a 17-year-old girl who was picked up in the middle of the night by a 39-year-old man she had met online.
Thomas told police he had left her alive on the side of a road in Ohio, but investigators found no evidence that Haley was ever seen alive after that. Instead, they uncovered evidence showing that the two had been together at the rented house. The worst part is the effect has on the family members. just be just disheartening to them what happened and why did it happen and how did it happen.
I mean there’s a lot of questions unanswered. I’m sure they’ve got they’ve gotten in in their mind. According to investigators, there were clear signs that he had tried to cover his tracks and there was his own version of events which became less believable with every new piece of evidence uncovered.
How could police not launch a full-scale search for a missing teenager who was believed to have run away when the last person known to be with her was an adult man who openly admitted he had picked her up? The first thing her family noticed wasn’t that Haley was gone. What stood out was that everything else looked exactly the way it was supposed to.
No broken locks, no shattered windows, no signs that anyone had forced their way inside. The only things missing were Haley, a packed bag, and the note she had intentionally left behind asking the people she loved not to look for her. She was 17 years old. It was 6:00 in the morning on January 6th, 2026. And she walked out of her bedroom in her family’s home in Fischers, Indiana, completely of her own free will.
That detail matters because the police saw exactly what her family saw, reached the same conclusion most people would have reached, and classified the case as a teenage runaway. No Amber Alert, no immediate escalation of the search. On paper, a teenager who leaves a note and packs a bag looks like a teenager who made the decision to leave on their own.
The Fischer Police Department didn’t get the facts wrong. They got the meaning of those facts wrong. Haley Paige Busby was born on October 9th, 2008. She lived in Fisers with her father Bo, her stepmother Renee, and her younger sister Sabria. Her mother is listed in her obituary as Lindsay Simmons.
She also had a brother named Elijah. That was her family. And according to everyone who knew her, Haley was the kind of person a family quietly builds its life around without even realizing it until she’s gone. When she first met people, she was shy. That’s the first thing almost everyone remembered about her.
And that matters because once she opened up, people discovered the side of her they never forgot. She was funny, quick-witted, and always laughing. She had a way of making whoever she was talking to feel like they were the only person in the room. She had dimples when she smiled. The people who knew her often described her smile as contagious.
It’s the kind of word people sometimes use when they can’t quite find a better one, but in Haley’s case, they truly meant it. She could change the entire mood of a room simply by walking into it. At the same time, she was incredibly focused and responsible. She was an excellent student, a member of her school’s television journalism team, and she already had a clear vision for her future.
She planned to attend Indiana University, earn a degree in journalism, and build a career telling stories that mattered. She had already started saving money for college. Three or 4 days a week, Haley worked as a waitress at Kitchen on Maine in Fortville, Indiana. The people who worked alongside her described her exactly the way you’d expect someone truly dependable to be described.
responsible, hardworking, always on time, always greeting customers with a smile. And every single night, no matter what else was happening in her own life, she came home to tuck her little sister Sabria into bed. Think about that for a moment. A 17-year-old girl worked several days a week, saved money for college on her own, carefully built the future she had planned for herself, and still made sure her younger sister felt safe before falling asleep every night.
That was Haley Busby. That’s who she was before January of 2026. And here’s what her family didn’t know at the time. By the morning of January 6th, someone had been communicating with Haley for an entire year before she ever walked out that front door. It wasn’t a classmate. It wasn’t someone she met at a party or through mutual friends.
It was someone she had never met in person. someone who found her online and spent 12 months building what looked to a 17-year-old girl like a relationship worth leaving everything behind for. That’s how this story was built. The note was real. The packed bag was real. The decision to leave the house was real.
But every one of those things was the result of a full year of deliberate, patient, carefully planned manipulation by a predator who knew exactly how to make a teenager believe that running away was her own idea. The police didn’t know that yet. Her family didn’t know that yet. And Haley herself standing alone in her room in the darkness sometime before 6:00 that morning writing a note asking the people she loved not to search for her.
Didn’t know it either. But now you do. January 5th, 2026 was a Monday. It was the first day of the second semester of her junior year of high school. According to her family, the day was completely ordinary. She came home. The evening passed like any other evening. The last time anyone in that house saw her was at 10:00 that night. 8 hours later, she was gone.
When Bo and Raineia woke up and realized Haley wasn’t getting ready for school, they checked her room. The note was there. Some of her belongings were missing. And they immediately called the Fischer Police Department because there was no possible way they could read that note and simply do nothing. Officers arrived.
They saw exactly what was in front of them. Uh, no signs of forced entry, no evidence of a struggle. A note written in Haley’s own handwriting, a bag that had clearly been packed on purpose. They classified her as a runaway. No Amber Alert was issued. And that’s the decision people will always remember. The officers weren’t careless. They acted based on the evidence they had in front of them.
Statistically, when a teenager leaves a note and takes their belongings, it points to someone who left voluntarily. That’s exactly how the system is designed to interpret cases like this, and that’s exactly what it did. But the system couldn’t do what no one standing in that room on the morning of January 6th could have done.
It couldn’t look at a note written by a 17-year-old girl and recognize that in any real sense, the words were no longer entirely her own. They were the final result of a full year of someone else’s influence, planted so carefully and so gradually that even Haley herself likely believed those thoughts were genuinely hers.
That’s what grooming looks like from the outside. It looks like a voluntary choice. It looks like a teenager deciding to leave on their own. From every visible angle, it looked exactly the way the police believed it did. In the note, Haley wrote that she had run away from home. She asked everyone not to look for her. Her parents reported her missing anyway because that’s what parents do when they know something is wrong, even if they can’t yet explain exactly what it is.
Investigators would later determine that the grooming had begun in early 2025, a full year before Haley left her home. The person communicating with her wasn’t in a hurry. 12 months isn’t an accident. 12 months is a strategy. It’s enough time to earn someone’s trust, learn what they fear and what they dream about, become the one person they believe truly understands them, and convince them that running away feels like freedom instead of danger.
Haley had been saving money for college. She had a clear plan for her future. Every night, she tucked her younger sister into bed. She wasn’t a teenager who felt lost, didn’t know where life was headed, or was looking for a way to escape it. She was a teenager who had been systematically manipulated by someone who knew exactly what they were doing.
That’s what never fit the runaway narrative. And that’s exactly what her family sensed from the very beginning, even though they couldn’t prove it. You don’t spend an entire year building your future only to throw it all away on a random impulse one day. Something or someone changed her mind, and her family felt it. They knew it the moment they read that note.
The question investigators ultimately had to answer wasn’t whether Haley left voluntarily. She did. The real question was who convinced her to leave, how they did it, and where she was going. And the answer to that last question would take the longest to uncover because by the time the sun came up on January 6th, 2026, Haley Busby was already somewhere her family couldn’t reach her.
She had a packed bag. She left a note behind. And she was heading towards something that someone she trusted, someone she believed she knew, had spent an entire year carefully building for her, one step at a time. her family had already called the police. The police had a classification that matched the visible evidence and the gap between those two facts would shape everything that happened next.
There’s one more important detail about the morning of January 6th before the story moves forward. In her note, Haley asked no one to look for her. Her parents read it and called the police anyway. That decision made within minutes of realizing their daughter was gone, before anyone knew what had really happened, before any evidence had been gathered or any conversations recovered, is what gave this case an official beginning.
Otherwise, it’s entirely possible the note would have been taken at face value. The classification would never have changed and Haley would have remained listed as a runaway until every lead had gone cold. Her parents refused to let that happen. They made that phone call and that call started the clock on uncovering who had spent an entire year turning their daughter into someone who would walk out of her own home in the middle of the night and ask her parents not to follow her.
What investigators discovered as they began untangling the case wasn’t something they could understand overnight. The person responsible had been extremely careful. The platform, the method of communication, the timeline, even the note itself had all been constructed with such patience and precision that the first look at the evidence pointed exactly where it was meant to point away from the truth.
Sometime after 3:00 in the morning on January 6th, Haley Busby walked out of her parents house and got into a dark SUV. Her parents saw it on their own security cameras. Police couldn’t identify the driver, but they reviewed surveillance footage from around the area until they obtained the license plate number.
The vehicle was a 2014 Acura registered to a woman whose name has never been publicly released. When investigators contacted her, she told them she hadn’t even been in Indiana that night. She was in Florida, but she gave them a critical piece of information. She said the person who may have been driving her vehicle was a man named Tyler Thomas. He was 39 years old.
Take a moment and think about that. A 39year-old man, completely unknown to the Busby family, unknown to police, and not previously connected to the case, was apparently driving a vehicle that belonged to a woman who was in another state. And he showed up in the middle of the night to pick up a 17-year-old girl.
The owner of the vehicle had his phone number. That’s one detail that has never really fit the bigger picture. And no one has ever fully explained it. How did she know him? Why did she have his number? What was the relationship between them? None of those details have ever been made public. That gap in the story remains unanswered to this day.
But what mattered most was what the Fischer Police Department did with that phone number. They tracked it. Cell phone data showed that Tyler Thomas was at a home on Hunter Avenue in the Victorian Village neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio. On January 16th, 10 days after Haley disappeared, officers from the Fischer Police Department working with the Columbus Division of Police found him there.
Later, the department publicly stated that he had been located within days of Haley’s disappearance. But January 16th is 10 days after January 6th. That’s not within days. The wording appears to have been chosen deliberately and it’s worth paying attention to. When a department describes 10 days as within days, it’s controlling how the timeline sounds to the public.
During questioning, Tyler cooperated with investigators. That’s how official sources describe it. He initially claimed he had been in Indiana, quote, looking at different places, including the local airport and an apple orchard. That was his first explanation, an apple orchard in January at 3:00 in the morning. Later, he abandoned that story and gave investigators something much closer to the truth, or at least his version of it. He admitted that he knew Haley.
He admitted that he picked her up on the morning of January 6th. Then he told investigators where he claimed he had dropped her off at the intersection of US Route 25 and State Route 320 in Eaton, Ohio, an intersection in the middle of the night in January. He insisted that’s where he left her. By that point, investigators already understood something important.
Tyler Thomas told them he had known Haley for an entire year. Not a few weeks, not a few months, a full year. He said they first met through Discord and later continued communicating through Discord, Roblox, and League of Legends. A 39year-old man and a 16-year-old girl had built a relationship across multiple online platforms over the course of 12 months.
And his explanation for all of it was simple. He claimed he was just helping her run away. He said he drove her roughly a 100 miles, dropped her off at a rural intersection, and had nothing to do with her after that. Investigators didn’t believe him. Of course, they didn’t. Someone who spends an entire year building a trusting relationship with a child, doesn’t drive her to a deserted intersection in rural Ohio, wish her good luck, and leave.
That’s not what that year was for. But on January 16th, investigators still didn’t have enough legal grounds to arrest him. So, he walked away. The only thing they could do at that point was change the classification of the case. On January 20th, the Fischer Police Department released an official statement.
It said in part, “Haley did not act alone. She left her home either on the evening of January 5th or during the early morning hours of January 6th. Haley left the house voluntarily and had a plan in place before she left, which is why the case was initially classified as a runaway. We do not believe she acted on her own.
Based on facts uncovered during the investigation that cannot be publicly disclosed at this time, her case has been reclassified as that of a missing endangered juvenile. 14 days. That’s how long it took for Haley’s case to be moved out of the runaway category. From the very first morning her parents insisted she was in danger.
Since January 6th, her father, Bo, had spent every waking minute doing the work the original classification prevented law enforcement from doing at full scale. He gathered everything he could find from Haley’s digital footprint and turned it over to investigators. He coordinated friends, relatives, and the community until the search for Haley grew into something far larger than a typical missing person effort.
Local businesses paid for billboards. People covered their cars with her photo and missing person flyers. Volunteers distributed flyers across Indiana and neighboring states. A massive social media campaign ran around the clock. And all of it happened while Haley was still officially classified as a runaway.
The case wasn’t reclassified until January 20th. Um, a search warrant for the home where Tyler lived was executed on January 21st. During that search, investigators interviewed Tyler again. what he told them the second time was even worse than what he had said the first time. He admitted they had also been communicating through another platform, one Haley’s father had never found in her digital records, and one law enforcement couldn’t access.
It was called Session. Session allows users to create an account without a phone number, an email address, or any personal information. The platform doesn’t collect IP addresses. It doesn’t collect location data. It doesn’t retain metadata. It uses end-to-end encryption and supports disappearing messages. Anyone can create an account.
The terms of service require users to confirm they are at least 18 years old, but there is no age verification. None at all. The platform was intentionally designed to remain invisible both to law enforcement and to the company that supports it. Tyler told investigators they deliberately used session because he knew police would never be able to see what they had been talking about.
Then he repeated the same explanation. He claimed he was simply helping Haley run away. That remained his story. Think about the progression of those platforms. First came Roblox or League of Legends, where a child is already spending time, where a large age difference doesn’t immediately stand out because the context is a game.
That’s where trust begins. Then came Discord. The conversations became more direct, more personal, more private, and once the relationship reached the point where the messages themselves could become evidence, they moved to session a platform specifically designed so no one could ever read those conversations. Every step intentionally reduced the possibility of oversight.
Every step required Haley to willingly follow him to the next platform, which means that before each new step, she already trusted him. That process lasted an entire year. For 12 months, Tyler Thomas gradually moved Haley Busby from a regular gaming platform to an encrypted messaging app with self-destructing messages.
And his explanation was that he was only helping her run away. By then, investigators already had his statements. They had his admission about session. They had the timeline. The only thing they still didn’t have was Haley. On January 20th, the same day the case was reclassified. Bo Busby was still organizing community search efforts.
The billboards were already up. Cars were covered with Haley’s photos. Flyers had already spread across multiple states. And through all of that, one question still remained unanswered. Tyler had identified a very specific location, the intersection of US Route 25 and State Route 320 in Eaton, Ohio.
He described it in remarkable detail. So much detail that it sounded like a place he had actually been. Investigators had to decide whether to treat that statement as truthful or as a deliberate attempt to send the investigation in the wrong direction. At that point, the entire case revolved around that question. Was Tyler telling the truth about Eaton, Ohio? Or did he name that intersection for an entirely different reason? His own story could no longer answer that question.
He had already given investigators his version of events. If the answer existed at all, it would have to come from somewhere else. What you already know, but Bo Busby didn’t know on January 20th, as he continued organizing search efforts, is that the session messages were already gone. Everything Tyler had said to Haley during that year, everything he told her to do, everywhere he instructed her to go, none of it could ever be recovered.
The platform had done exactly what it was designed to do. Every conversation had been erased. The only account of what happened between them came from Tyler himself. And according to him, he dropped a 17-year-old girl at a rural intersection in Ohio in January and drove away. Tyler told investigators he had absolutely no idea where Haley was.
He said it directly face to face to the detective sitting across from him. Then they asked him one more question. If he had done something to Haley, would he tell them? His answer was no. After that, he asked for a lawyer. Stop for a moment and think about that sequence. Not the denial itself, but the answer to the next question.
Someone who has done nothing doesn’t answer a question like that the way Tyler did. But there was something Tyler didn’t know while he was sitting in that room. He didn’t know the search warrant being executed on his property at that very moment was already exposing everything he believed he had successfully hidden.
He didn’t know the phone in his pocket, the one investigators were about to examine, would make his denials meaningless. He didn’t know the answer to the question of where Haley was, had been sitting inside his own devices the entire time he was talking to detectives. He asked for a lawyer, and investigators went back to work.
What they found on that phone was worse than most of them had prepared for. They discovered a large collection of child sexual abuse material. Haley appeared in those files and investigators were able to identify the location because they had stood there themselves only hours earlier. The house in Columbus, the property Tyler had casually described as a place he used.
Those images confirmed he had never dropped Haley off anywhere. They confirmed she had been at that property. They confirmed that multiple crimes against a child had taken place there and that Tyler had later tried to delete evidence from his own device. He failed. And Haley wasn’t the only child he had been grooming for abuse.
Nothing more needs to be said about the content of those files. What matters for understanding what happened to Haley is the location data recovered from that same phone because that data told the story Tyler couldn’t erase. It confirmed that he picked Haley up early on the morning of January 6th, exactly as investigators had already believed.
It confirmed he took her to the property in Columbus, something the images had already established. But then the phone data revealed something investigators hadn’t known before. Later that same day, January 6th, Tyler didn’t stay at the Columbus property. Instead, he drove Haley to an Airbnb rental, a rural property in Hawking County, Ohio.
His phone showed that they stayed there overnight. Then at 9:25 on the morning of January 7th, Tyler left the Airbnb and drove to Wayne National Forest. His phone placed him there until 2:15 that afternoon. After that, he returned to the property in Columbus. That’s 4 hours and 50 minutes inside Wayne National Forest with no official explanation of what he was doing there.
When investigators questioned Tyler about the Airbnb, he denied Haley had ever been there. He claimed he had rented the property for himself alone, just a solo trip. There was only one problem with that story. When he made the reservation, he listed two guests. That single detail, one number on a booking form, gave investigators probable cause to search the Airbnb and the surrounding property.
And it uncovered something else as well. Tyler hadn’t just lied about the number of guests. He had left something behind on that property that no lie could ever hide. But investigators didn’t know that yet. Not on the day they first searched the house. By January 31st, 2026, however, they had enough evidence to take Tyler into custody.
Authorities reported that he voluntarily turned himself in after being asked to do so. That same day, he was charged with distributing child sexual abuse material and with tampering with evidence. The following day, the Fischer Police Department held a press conference. For the first time, specific details of Haley’s case were made public.
And later that very same day, February 1st, 2026, one day after Tyler walked into that building and surrendered to police, he led investigators to Haley’s body. It pains me today to let you know that after an extensive investigation, we feel that uh Haley is deceased. I spent some time with the family this morning along with Chief Gart and their wishes were truly to express what an incredible human being Haley was.
Um she was a a bright light in the family. She was a wonderful big sister. She had a tremendous amount of promise and hope. She was excited about moving on to university and she was an incredible human being and I know that her family is devastated currently and I’m confident that our community will rally in the coming hours, days, and weeks to stand with that family in their grief and share in the burden of mending and healing uh from this tragic loss.
Unfortunately, this is tragic news for our community. Our detectives identified a suspect, 39-year-old Tyler Thomas of Ohio. Because of evidence obtained in the statements made by the suspect, the investigation is now moved to recovery efforts. On January 6, we responded to the Busby residence.
Her parents had reported that she had left overnight. Our officers and our detectives diligently beca uh diligently began the process to locate her using all of our resources available. Throughout the investigation, we were able to identify an unknown vehicle that had been in Haley’s neighborhood the night she had gone missing.
Using technology, our detectives identified Thomas as a suspect she had left with. We made contact with him in Ohio and he admitted to picking Haley up at her home. He told us that he dropped her off on the side of the road in western Ohio. However, through continued investigations, his initial story was determined to be untrue.
We continue to diligently work with the FBI, the Indiana State Police, and our Ohio partners, the Columbus Police Department, and the Hawking County Sheriff’s Office. And after further investigation, Columbus Police Department’s homicide unit assisted in serving search warrants where more evidence was collected at the home and the vehicle he had picked Haley up in.
The investigation confirmed Haley to be at the Thomas home in Columbus and at a short-term rental in Hawking County. The Hawking County Sheriff’s Office served search warrants for the short-term rental property and coordinated the use of aerial drones, canine, and physical search techniques to try to find Haley.
Investigators from all agencies involved continue to search for Haley. The suspect is in police custody in Ohio on charges associated with this case, but has not been charged with her murder at this time. This is an ongoing investigation that now continues in Ohio. We will continue to support those agencies and help with their investigation in any way possible.
Our hearts are with her family, her friends, and our community as we try to get through this terrible time together. Additional details about Haley’s cause of death have never been released. I’m not going to describe in greater detail what investigators found in that forest. The fact itself is enough. I’ve covered a lot of cases.
This one has stayed with me. Haley Busby was 17 years old. She was considered missing for 26 days. And the man who knew exactly where she was spent that entire time walking free. Even though Tyler personally led investigators to her body, as of the time the story was recorded, he still had not been charged with her murder.
His bond was set at $1,500,000. His attorney stated that he had no intention of posting bond and Tyler Thomas planned to plead not guilty. Think about what that means. He personally took investigators to that location. He knew exactly where it was because he had been there on a documented date for nearly 5 hours and his phone confirmed every mile of the trip.
There is no version of those facts that requires additional interpretation. And yet the word murder still did not appear in the charges against him. Investigators ask the public to be patient. That’s a difficult thing to ask of anyone who has followed this case. It’s even harder to ask Haley’s family. But in the weeks that followed, the reason for the delay became much clearer.
When investigators returned to the Airbnb and searched it a second time, they found something the first search had missed. Potential traces of blood were found throughout the residence, not in just one area, but across the house. That discovery changed investigators working theory about where Haley had actually died. the Airbnb in Hawking County, the property Tyler had described as nothing more than a solo getaway, the same property where he had listed two guests on the reservation, is now believed by prosecutors to be the place where Haley was killed. On
February 10th, the federal government joined the case. The original two charges were dismissed and replaced with federal charges. It’s impossible to understate the tragic nature of this circumstance. And again, I want to emphasize um and not being gratuitous, but you know, our client had every right in the world to keep his mouth shut and not participate and let whatever chips that were fall where they may.
Um he did precisely the opposite. He’s been cooperative um to the extent that, you know, he’s been able and that cooperation has been um fruitful. I can tell you that yesterday we accompanied law enforcement and the FBI um to Perry County and we assisted with pinpointing the location of of Miss Busby. Will he be charged with homicide in Perry or Hawking County? We anticipate that charges in that regard will will come from Hawking County.
Do you know when? Uh we don’t. Um, as you can imagine, these charges here, you know, were agreed upon and and and they’re I don’t want to call them a placeholder, but um, you know, he’s not going to make bond, so nobody’s trying to rush anything. I mean, there’s some procedural considerations for all parties at play.
Um, but right now, everybody has time to take a breath and and, you know, move ahead accordingly. There’s a difference between being responsible for certain acts of which one is not proud and also distinguishing from taking another’s life. Um, I can tell you that he will be entering a a not-uilty plea if and when he’s charged with a homicide in this matter and will proceed accordingly.
If murder charges are added to the charges he already faces, Tyler could be looking at a lengthy prison sentence and potentially the death penalty. And when those new federal charges were announced, prosecutors revealed something that had never before appeared in the public case records. January 6th, 2026 was not the first time Tyler Thomas had met Haley Busby in person.
He had traveled to Indiana twice during 2025. Bank records placed him at a gas station in Indiana on July 5th, 2025. After that stop, he went to the restaurant where Haley worked. He walked into the very place where she worked in her own hometown, and no one who knew Haley had any idea who he was or why he was there.
Then on July 2nd, 2025, there was a photograph showing Tyler and Haley together inside his vehicle. Cell phone records also show that he made a call from a location consistent with the two of them being together that day. He had already traveled to see her twice before he picked her up on January 6th. He had been inside the building where she worked.
He had been alone with her in his vehicle months before January 6th. And no one in Haley’s life knew any of it. That’s what grooming really looks like from the outside. It looks like nothing is happening at all. Haley was 13 years old when Tyler first contacted her online. She was 14 when she disappeared. But even setting her age aside completely, Indiana law has recently changed.
A new law passed in direct response to cases like this specifically addresses situations where an adult uses their position or influence to groom a child into what appears to be voluntary consent. And that law exists in part because of what Haley’s family chose to do after they lost her because Haley’s family refused to let their story end with grief alone.
News of Haley’s tragic death has also gained attention here at the state house. Both the attention of Governor Mike Braraw and lawmakers. Haley’s family has started a petition asking lawmakers to pass Haley’s law. And Governor Brun said he believes that lawmakers should do something this session to address that.
I spoke with some lawmakers, including two who represent Haley’s family, and they say they’re looking at what can be done. We all uh are grieving with you. Uh thoughts and prayers are with you. A message from Indiana Governor Mike Brun to the family of 17-year-old Haley Busby. The family of the Fischer teen has their own message for the people who make decisions at the Indiana State House.
pass Haley’s law to protect others from online predators. According to the petition, police did not issue an Amber Alert for Haley because they had no proof she was abducted and she was classified as a runaway. No silver alert went out either because Haley didn’t have a disability or medical condition to warrant it.
The petition says a pink alert would fill in the gaps in the alert system and cover missing people and kids when credible risk factors exist. In a tweet, Governor Brun said he’s working with Indiana State Police to identify solutions to those gaps. And in an interview Tuesday, the governor also called out big tech. Big tech is going to have to start taking responsibility.
These are their platforms. This session, the Senate considered a bill that would have put restrictions on social media for minors, but that part of the bill was taken out before the Senate passed it. Governor Braun indicated support for the request Haley’s parents are making for lawmakers to do something. I think it’d be smart to do something now while we’re still inside.
Haley’s family didn’t wait for every charge to be filed. In the middle of the worst tragedy of their lives, they decided to do everything they could to make sure the legal gap Tyler had exploited would no longer be available to the next person who tried to do the same thing. The internet didn’t create predators, but it gave them something they had never had before.
It gave them direct access to children inside their own homes, inside their bedrooms, through devices their parents had bought for them, devices that schools often require students to use. The platforms where Tyler first contacted Haley weren’t hidden corners of the internet. They were ordinary places children visit every single day, places everyone considers normal, places where an adult talking to a child doesn’t automatically raise alarm because adults also use those platforms for completely legitimate reasons. And once that
initial contact is made on an open platform, the next step is almost always the same. Move the conversation somewhere harder to monitor, somewhere that offers the adult more protection, somewhere the message history is much more difficult to recover. Session was one of those platforms. There are others.
The point isn’t the specific app. The point is getting the child to agree to keep secrets. And that’s exactly what an experienced groomer spends weeks or even months building long before ever asking a child to hide something. Tyler had been creating that willingness at least since the summer of 2025 and possibly even earlier. The complete timeline of his communications with Haley has still never been fully released. But one fact is certain.
When he drove to Indiana on January 6th, 2026, Haley got into his vehicle willingly. She got into that car because she trusted him. And that trust was not her mistake. It was the result of months of deliberate manipulation on his part. That distinction matters. It matters to every parent and every child who may one day encounter someone like Tyler Thomas in a place that appears completely safe.
Haley’s family understood that difference better than anyone and they decided that understanding alone wasn’t enough. They went to the Indiana General Assembly. They pushed for legislation that was ultimately passed. They sat in lawmakaker offices and told the story of their daughter to the people who had the power to change the law.
And they did all of that while still waiting for the answer to another question. Would the man who killed their daughter ever be formally charged with that crime? That’s what Haley’s family was doing while Tyler Thomas remained in custody on a $1,500,000 bond and prepared to plead not guilty. As of early February 2026, the federal charges against him were already extremely serious.
But the biggest question was still unanswered. It was the question Haley’s family and everyone following this case was waiting to hear answered. Would the word murder ever appear in an official indictment next to Tyler Thomas’s name? By then, investigators already had his location data. They had the evidence seized from his devices.
They had the Airbnb reservation listing two guests. And they had the blood evidence discovered throughout the house during the second search. Two bills into law inspired by the death of 17-year-old Haley Busby. One expands a definition of a missing child to include high-risk missing people. It also extends a silver alert program to missing children.
The other adds protections for minors online and strengthens parental control. Social media platforms must now get parental consent for users under 16. The bill was championed by Haley’s family after she was reported missing in January. Indiana could be known and placed on the leaderboard across the country as a place that protects its children and the risk and vulnerability and the threat that’s within our homes, our community in the state will start to dissipate.
And so I appreciate all the hard work and the effort and the fight that you guys are taking to it. So, thank um what investigators were building wasn’t just a criminal case. They were building a case that could withstand trial. Not simply one that would result in charges, but one that would end with a conviction that couldn’t be overturned because of procedural mistakes.
That takes time and it takes patience. Something that’s almost impossible to ask of people living through this kind of loss. But the evidence wasn’t going anywhere. Neither was Tyler Thomas. At the time, it still hadn’t been publicly decided whether any future murder charge would be filed in Hawking County or Perry County.
The Airbnb was located in Hawking County. Um, the forest where Haley was found was in Perry County. Two jurisdictions, one criminal case. The answer to which county would prosecute the murder case would shape the entire legal strategy in ways the public couldn’t yet see. But one thing was already clear. 14-year-old Haley Busby from Fischers, Indiana, had been missing for 26 days.
During that entire time, her family lived without knowing whether she was still alive. The man who knew the answer to that question spent those same 26 days insisting he had no idea where she was. Then the day after he voluntarily surrendered to law enforcement on the lesser charges, he led investigators into a forest in Ohio and showed them what he had done.
Think about how many people you’ve talked to online this week without really knowing who they are. Not just strangers in comment sections, people you’ve messaged for work, people you’ve played online games with, people whose usernames you’ve seen so often they started to feel familiar. The fact that this has become normal isn’t an accident.
It’s exactly the environment that made what happened to Haley possible, and it’s the same environment that still exists today. Gaming platforms remain one of the most vulnerable spaces. Roblox and League of Legends are among the platforms most frequently mentioned in cases like this, and the reason lies in how they’re designed.
Large numbers of users share the same servers. Those servers include public chat rooms and from those public chats, it’s only a few clicks to private messages. The entire structure allows a conversation to move from a crowded public space to a private one in just a few steps. At none of those stages does the platform verify who the people on the other side of the conversation really are.
In 2023, Roblox reported more than 13,000 child exploitation incidents to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Since 2018, Child Safety Reporting has documented at least 30 arrests directly involving predators who abducted or sexually exploited children they first met through the platform. 30 arrests.
And those are only the cases that ended in arrests. That number doesn’t include cases that were never reported, never investigated, or never produced enough evidence to support criminal charges. The pattern in cases like these is almost always the same. It starts with a predator building trust in a public chat where everything looks like ordinary conversation about a game.
Then the discussion moves somewhere else. Snapchat, Discord, Session, any platform that offers greater privacy, fewer message records, and less oversight. And once the conversation becomes private, it changes. Discussions about the game give way to personal questions, then to something entirely different.
By the time a child begins to understand what’s happening, the relationship already feels real. The trust feels earned. the person on the other side of the screen has spent weeks or months being patient, attentive, and kind, and that patience is the most powerful tool they have. In January 2026, Roblox changed its system. It now requires age verification to access any chat features, either through facial age estimation or by uploading a governmentissued identification document.
Artificial intelligence estimates a user’s approximate age and places them into an age group with other users of a similar range. That’s the system currently in place. But ask yourself how much protection that really provides. A system that only estimates how old someone appears to be operates on a platform where the greatest danger comes from people pretending to be someone they’re not.
There’s a reason companies like Roblox have faced numerous lawsuits and there’s a reason that number continues to grow. The issue isn’t that these companies have done nothing. It’s that their efforts haven’t matched the scale of a problem they’ve known about for years. And it’s in that gap between knowing the problem exists and taking meaningful action that children get hurt.
Haley’s family isn’t waiting for the courts to finish their work. They’re not waiting for online platforms to update their policies. They proposed a specific solution and gave it a name, Haley’s Law. The proposal focuses on three separate areas. The first is creating a new alert system called Pink Alert. The second is requiring schools to teach students how to recognize online grooming.
The third is adding stronger safeguards that would change how online platforms work with law enforcement while increasing penalties for grooming offenses. Every one of those proposals directly addresses a specific problem exposed by Haley’s case. None of them are abstract ideas. Start with the alert system because that’s where the first and most obvious failure occurred.
When Haley disappeared, she didn’t meet the criteria for an Amber Alert. She also didn’t qualify for a silver alert. On the surface, it looked as though she had left voluntarily. At least that’s what the available evidence suggested. Existing alert systems cannot distinguish between a child who truly leaves home by choice and a child who has been psychologically manipulated into doing so.
From the outside, those situations look almost identical. and the system treats them the same way. Um, Haley’s family argues they are fundamentally different. Amber Alert was created in 1996. In 1996, the idea of stranger danger meant a man in a van near a playground. It didn’t mean a 39-year-old man spending months building a relationship with a child through a gaming platform, convincing her he could be trusted, and then arranging a face-to-face meeting under false pretenses. The threat has changed.
The alert system hasn’t. Pink Alert would use a completely different set of activation criteria. Credible evidence of online grooming or coercive digital communication. Contact with unknown individuals regardless of age. Suspicious travel plans. Signs of human trafficking or exploitation. Credible evidence that the missing person is in danger.
Circumstances involving isolation, concealment, or financial control. vulnerability because of age or other risk factors or a sudden unexplained disappearance with no verified contact or confirmed location. Any one of those criteria, if credibly supported, could be enough to activate the alert. Haley’s case showed several of them at once.
The most common argument against expanding alert systems is that if there are too many alerts, people will eventually stop paying attention, just as many people ignore car alarms. That’s a serious concern and it deserves a serious response. But at the very least, if a new category of alerts would create too much noise, then the existing categories need to be updated so they reflect how predators actually operate in 2026.
Either way, the current system no longer matches today’s threats. Haley’s case is direct evidence of that. Indiana has already made some progress. Because there wasn’t enough time left in the legislative session to introduce an entirely new bill, lawmakers incorporated the necessary provisions into legislation that was already moving through the process.
This evening, the family of a Fischer’s teen is honoring her life by helping other students. Applications are now open for the Haley Paige Busby Pink with a Purpose scholarship. Fox 59’s Scarlett O’Hara explains how it will recognize seniors who lead with care, kindness, and courage. Graduating seniors from Hamilton Southeastern High School here, where Haley Busby walked the halls or Fischer High School can now apply for the Pink with a Purpose scholarship in her honor.
She helps so many others feel seen and um valued and and and not alone. Um, and we know that the the smallest acts of kindness can have life-saving impacts. Haley’s Army for Children isn’t looking to only reward star athletes or validictorians. Through their nonprofit, Busby’s family wants to make sure the light she poured into her community lives on.
Haley, she did have plans in a in a folder full of pamphlets to go to uh to look at different colleges and yeah, I think some of it is um continuing to support, you know, children and and their dreams and and the great work that they’re doing. Now, her father, Bo Busby, says protecting other kids from internet predators is the core mission of the nonprofit.
I can’t think of a more worthy fight and you know I’m sort of just unwilling to accept uh where things are today. With a community willing to join that fight through fundraisers and donations, Busby says the organization is rolling out training and education programs for parents on internet safety and actively offering support to families of missing children.
He wants to continue building on Haley’s legacy and expand the scholarship to more schools next year. But for now, Busby says they’re taking things day by day. I think it’s given hope to a lot of people um to see something so, you know, so tragic, but um that has given so many a purpose. Amendments to House Bill 1303 expanded the legal definition of a missing child to include children who disappear under circumstances indicating an elevated risk.
Those changes were approved unanimously on February 9th, 2026. In April, Governor Mike Braun signed the bill into law. In addition, Governor Braun also signed a separate measure requiring social media platforms to obtain parental consent for users under the age of 16. Good evening. My name is Chris and I’m one of the pastors here.
On behalf of Haley’s father, Bo, I was asked to read this letter. Dear Haley Paige. Hi, sweetheart. I want you to know how incredibly grateful I am for the time we had together on this earth. I still consider myself the luckiest dad ever. You and I made so many beautiful memories, and I will carry them with me forever, revisiting them every single day.
I will always feel your sweet hugs and kisses on my cheek, though now I won’t have to wipe off the lip gloss. You’d apologize for that, but I always wore it with pride. You saved me the day you were born, Haley, and you continued to save me every day after that. You gave me a purpose to love and protect you.
I will do my very best to share the same love with others and I will never forget where that love began. I witnessed your love and selflessness every single day. I could not have asked for a more loving, respectful daughter. You mean so much to so many. Your relationship with Raa, your little sis, your grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends was something truly special.
I continue to hear from others how much you meant to them and the incredible impact you had. You were my shy girl, but your presence was always strong through the kindness, love, and beauty you shared. You always put others first without reservation or complaint. I want you to know that Raa, Sabria, and I know how much you loved us.
Please guide me as I try my best to tuck in your sister the way you did every night. And sweetheart, we are at peace knowing that you know just how much you continue to be loved. I know the teenage years were tough at times, but you navigated them with such grace and strength. Like so many others, you may have felt alone at times despite the love that surrounded you.
But I want you to know this wasn’t your fault. And today I’m here to show you that you were never alone and you never will be. Lastly, I want you to know that the changes we make going forward will re will be rooted in the love you brought into the world during your time with us. We will be okay, sweetheart.
Please allow yourself to finally rest. We love you with all my love. You’re a proud dad. But that’s still not the full version of Haley’s Law. The Busby family plans to introduce the complete bill during Indiana’s 2027 legislative session. What became law in 2026 is only the foundation, not the full framework they hope to build.
The second part of Haley’s Law focuses on teaching children in schools how to recognize grooming. Indiana’s curriculum already includes lessons on cyber bullying and human trafficking, but there is no requirement to teach students what grooming looks like, how it works, or how it feels in its earliest stages. That isn’t an accidental oversight.
It’s a policy choice. One that leaves children without what may be their most important tool, the ability to recognize the process before it’s too late. Education alone won’t stop a predator. No one claims that it will. But a child who understands what grooming looks like has a far better chance of recognizing it when it’s happening to them.
Haley’s family isn’t waiting for the law to take effect before beginning that work. They’re already meeting with communities. They’re already speaking to parents and students about how these relationships are built online, what the first warning signs look like, and what a child should do if something doesn’t feel right.
The third part of Haley’s Law focuses on accountability both for offenders and for online platforms. First, it calls for tougher penalties for grooming offenses. That’s the first piece. The second addresses how quickly online platforms respond to law enforcement requests for user information. When investigators are searching for a missing child and urgently need information from a platform, response time isn’t a minor bureaucratic issue.
it can determine whether that child is found in time. Haley’s law would require online platforms to provide specific user information to law enforcement without unnecessary delay. It would also create consequences for platforms that fail to do so. In addition, the proposal would require platforms to disclose to families how long they typically take to respond to law enforcement requests, allowing parents to make informed decisions about whether they want their children using those services.
There is a separate 12-page document explaining Haley’s law in full. It’s publicly available, and if you’re a parent, it’s it’s genuinely worth reading. In the middle of June, another bill was introduced in the United States House of Representatives. It was sponsored by Rudy Yakim and is known as the Haley Act.
Haley stands for high-risk alert improvement for locating endangered youth. If passed, the legislation would allow law enforcement to issue an Amber Alert for a missing minor believed to be at high risk even before an abduction has been officially confirmed. Under current rules, confirmation of an abduction is generally required.
The Haley Act would lower that threshold. If a child disappears under circumstances indicating a serious risk to their life or safety, law enforcement could activate a public alert immediately instead of waiting for investigators to determine exactly what happened. The Busby family supports both initiatives. The Haley Act and Pink Alert are not competing proposals.
They address the same problem at two different levels. one federal and one at the state level. Together, they aim to close a gap the law still fails to address. The recognition that a child who has been psychologically manipulated into leaving home is not the same as a child who voluntarily leaves and is safe. Stop for a moment and think about that.
Haley’s family is pursuing these changes through legislation, through community education, and through every available avenue for change. They’re doing all of it while still living through the greatest loss of their lives. What they’re building is more than a memorial to Haley. It’s a concrete, well doumented, legally grounded effort to ensure that the next child who disappears under similar circumstances receives a very different response from the system that failed to protect Haley.
The only unanswered question is whether that system will change quickly enough. The full bill is expected to be introduced during the 2027 legislative session. That’s still ahead. In the meantime, the platforms Haley’s law seeks to hold more accountable, continue operating under essentially the same rules that were in place when Haley disappeared.
Um, Haley’s family didn’t stop even after the criminal proceedings moved forward. That part of the story isn’t talked about nearly enough. After a tragedy like this, most families are simply trying to survive each new day to make it through another week, another month. Haley’s family started building something instead.
Just months after her death, they founded a nonprofit organization, developed the framework for new legislation, and began speaking to lawmakers in an effort to make the digital world far less hospitable to online predators. Their organization is called Haley’s Army for Children. Its mission is straightforward. Promoting online safety, prevention, education, and practical awareness built around the threats children face today, not the threats that existed 10 years ago.
The platforms have changed. The tactics predators use have changed. The law hasn’t kept pace. That’s the gap Haley’s family is trying to close. And that’s exactly why Haley’s law exists. At the time this case was covered, a change.org org petition supporting the proposal had already gathered more than 137,000 signatures.
137,000 people read Haley’s story and decided it was enough to take action. That’s more than a statistic. It’s 137,000 individual decisions not to stand by and do nothing. Think about what that means for a family that hadn’t even reached the first anniversary of their loss. They aren’t just grieving. They’re working, organizing, continuing to speak publicly, and their community hasn’t left them to carry that burden alone.
After Haley’s death, the city officially declared February pink for Haley month. Pink was her favorite color, and the support wasn’t merely symbolic. Pink ribbons, pink porch lights, pink decals on cars. an entire community decided that the least it could do was make sure that wherever Haley’s family looked, they would see that she was remembered and that they weren’t alone.
There’s something deeply important about that. Communities don’t do this for a name in a headline. They do it for a girl they actually knew, a girl who had a favorite color, a laugh people recognized, a presence that left a lasting mark on the lives around her. The pink wasn’t for the criminal case. It was for Haley.
Haley’s funeral was held on February 12th. Her brother Bo wrote her a letter. That day, the pastor read it aloud. A teenage boy somehow found words for something that hardly seems possible to put into words at all. And when the people inside that church heard his letter, something in each of them changed forever.
That is the burden Haley’s family carries. And yet they continue working on legislation, running a nonprofit, attending scholarship presentations, organizing charity motorcycle rides, showing up at school events, doing all of it while remaining the same family that sat in that church in February and listened as Bose’s letter was read aloud.
The scholarships awarded by Haley’s Army are meant to recognize young people who live with courage, kindness, and a strong sense of purpose. Those aren’t random words. They’re the very qualities people use to describe Haley. Her family isn’t honoring her memory in the abstract. They’re looking for those same qualities in other young people and telling them that what they carry within themselves matters.
Haley didn’t die because information was unavailable. The information already existed. Research on online grooming has been available for years. The warning signs have long been documented. The methods predators use through gaming platforms and social media aren’t secrets. They’ve been studied, published, and made publicly available.
What failed Haley wasn’t a lack of knowledge. It was the gap between what experts already understand and what children are actually taught. The gap between what researchers know and what a 12-year-old hears while sitting alone in their bedroom before that knowledge becomes essential for their own safety. That’s the gap Haley’s Law is trying to close.
and how it intends to do that matters. If children are taught in school what the grooming cycle looks like in language appropriate for their age, using real examples instead of vague warnings, then at least some of them will recognize it when it begins happening to them. Not all of them, but even some is enough to save lives.
The Child Rescue Coalition has already developed educational materials tailored to every school age group. There is also a dedicated guide for parents on how to help children use modern technology safely. These aren’t theoretical documents. They’re practical tools. They exist because the people who have spent years working in this field understand one simple truth.
For many parents, one of the hardest conversations to begin is simply sitting down beside their child and saying, “We need to talk about something important if they don’t if they don’t fully understand how to explain it themselves.” And a child who has never had grooming explained in simple age appropriate language won’t recognize what’s happening when it begins happening to them.
A child who doesn’t have the words to describe what’s being done to them won’t be able to tell anyone about it. They won’t be able to explain it to their parents. Sometimes they won’t even understand it themselves. So, and language isn’t a small thing. It can be the difference between a child who can say, “I know what’s wrong.
” And a child who thinks something feels wrong, but I’m afraid I’ll get in trouble. That’s why Haley’s family wants children to know those words before they ever need them. That’s the entire idea. Since Haley’s death, the Haley’s Army Facebook page has continued posting regular case updates, information about community events, and educational resources.
Harley’s for Haley is a charity motorcycle ride organized to raise awareness of Haley’s law. These aren’t massive government campaigns backed by millions of dollars. They’re the work of a family and a community that keep choosing over and over again not to stop. I’ve covered many criminal cases, but this one has stayed with me not only because of what happened to Haley, although that tragedy alone is devastating.
It has stayed with me because of what her family chose to do afterward. No one would have blamed them if they had withdrawn from the world, if they had needed years simply to learn how to keep living. Instead, within just a few months, they were doing everything they could to make sure the next child would have what Haley didn’t.
Asking that of people who are still living through the deepest part of their grief is almost impossible. It’s an enormous burden, and yet they continue to carry it. The conversation this case demands isn’t a comfortable one. It requires parents to know what apps their children are using. Not just their names, but how they actually work, what features they have, how private messaging functions, what a stranger can offer a child on a gaming platform at 2:00 in the morning when no adult is nearby.
It requires schools to begin treating digital safety as a core subject, not as the topic of a single presentation. It requires lawmakers to write laws for the world children live in today, not the world that existed when the previous laws were written. None of that will happen on its own. It requires people who care enough to push for change.
In February, an entire city turned pink for Haley. Her family is still working to make sure her name comes to represent something more than just another criminal case. She deserves the chance to grow up. she deserved the chance to discover who she would become. She never got that opportunity. Instead, she was given a family that refused to let her become just another statistic.
And a community that refused to let that family carry their pain alone. And now, more than 137,000 signatures stand behind a petition demanding that her name change the system. That’s what justice can look like after the law has done everything it can. It looks like people deciding that the story doesn’t end when the verdict is read.
