CNN
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Just after turning 20, Isaac Danian disappeared from his home in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in early September 2020, leaving a note for his siblings that warned them to “don’t get vaccinated” or “you won’t make it. heaven.”
His parents, Abigail and John Danian, told CNN that their son grew up during the pandemic. He said he came to believe that the Covid-19 vaccine was a government strategy to control people, and that the Covid experiment was equally dangerous. His parents say that before leaving the house, their son told them to sell all their belongings and move into another bedroom.
About a month after his disappearance, on October 4, 2020, Isaac Danian sent a text message with a picture of himself in a boat holding a large fish he had caught.
The family has not heard from him since.
“He called me to tell me that he will be in public for about 30 days or more and he wants to call me and let me know. So that I don’t spend those 30 days worrying about him,” his mother told CNN. Isaac did not say where he was going or who he was with.
“He said … it would be better if he didn’t,” Abigail Danian said, “but he always told me that I would have told you.”
Little did Isaac’s parents know at the time that before their son’s departure, he had started following a person on the internet who goes by the name Matthew Mellow, also known as Mortekai Eleazar on social media. On his YouTube channel Mellow spread false information about Covid, giving sermons about what he says is Satan’s plan to destroy humanity and false claims about the Covid-19 vaccine, which he called “the mark of the beast.”
Mellow posted a recruitment video online, looking for “strong men” to travel with him from Hawaii. in the South Pacific where Covid had not yet taken hold. In his video he showed that people can.
Isaac Danian signed up for the tour and left home on Saturday 2020 when his parents were out of town.
After his parents filed a missing persons report seven months later they learned from an investigator with the Kent County Sheriff’s Office in Michigan that their son was in contact with Mellow.
“This great actor encouraged them to fly to Hawaii and join the journey across the vast Pacific Ocean to find a Covid-free place where they can start again and escape the great satanic system,” author and journalist David Wolman, who first investigated the story in The New York Times, he told CNN.
Mellow discovered that he had arranged for several sailors to take him and his friends to the South Pacific. Danian is the second person, Shukree Abdul-Rashed, from Rochester, New York, was traveling in captain Mike Schmidt’s boat, while Mellow left a few days later in another boat with a different captain.
“They had a great time, catching a lot of fish,” Schmidt told CNN. Sometimes, Schmidt says, the weather was rough and the sea was dangerous.
“In one storm, I broke my nose on the wheel. The boat was lifted in the middle of the night and broke my nose. So we had a hard time, but most of the time we went to sea, we fished, we burned, the weather was beautiful.”
Schmidt told CNN that he went to the Cook Islands, but it turned out they were closed to entry because of the pandemic. Due to the bad weather, it is said that they turned the boat to American Samoa, but when they heard that they had to test for Covid to enter, they say, two of their passengers panicked, and threatened to jump off the boat.
Schmidt says he decided to travel about 300 kilometers to Wallis Island, a French territory between Hawaii and New Zealand. This is where the journey turned dark. When Schmidt notified authorities of their arrival to turn off their boat, he told CNN, Danian and Abdul-Rashed suddenly jumped overboard.
“What he jumped over is that he doesn’t want to be in the boat. They want to run away from this Covid PCR test. They were afraid to take the Covid test, since it was a sign of the beast now, they participated in the game,” said Schmidt.
As soon as the men jumped, Schmidt told CNN, they alerted Wallis Island authorities for help, and lowered a fishing boat to investigate. He also said that Danian’s goal was “to be forgotten by Abdul-Rashed and Matt Mellow and get out of the world. The three of them … have no connection to the United States whatsoever.”
According to Wolman, the journalist, “He was led astray by the Instagram era of a wannabe great prophet who spoke in the right way and in such a way as to attract these two young men.” Wolman called it “Covid witchcraft, end-times prophecy, Christian faith faces anxiety and chaos in 2020 election.”
Mellow did not respond to CNN’s multiple requests for comment. CNN has reached out to Abdul-Rashed’s family for comment.
According to a French police report obtained by CNN, Schmidt was questioned and authorities seized his 9-millimeter handgun, laptop and Garmin GPS device from the boat. Schmidt was eventually removed from the investigation.
“I never did anything to harm them,” Schmidt told CNN.
At that time, diving teams searched the area for the men, but found nothing.
In addition to the missing persons report they filed, Danian’s parents have asked for help from the State Department and French authorities. But there have been many problems along the way.
“The problem is that it’s not just far away, it’s other countries. There is a language barrier. We are dealing with the French courts,” John Danian told CNN. “It was on the water, and it was a maritime incident, so you have different agencies and authorities trying to coordinate this.”
Two years later, Abigail and John Danian are about to have their son.
“We are hopeful that he is alive because there hasn’t been any evidence to prove it,” Abigal Danian told CNN. “It’s possible that he wanted to leave the community and he’s crazy, it’s possible that he was abducted against his will. It’s possible that he drowned. If someone told you, your child is dead, would you just accept it and move on? We can’t do that.”
Last week, Danian received a letter from French authorities warning them that they were officially closing the investigation into his disappearance. The Danians are thinking of attracting what they have found.
“The only certainty they could make was that Isaac and Shukree both jumped into the ocean and there were no remains,” Abigail Danian told CNN. Meanwhile, the Kent County Sheriff’s Office said the missing persons investigation remains open. Isaac’s family says they have also been told by the State Department that there is a “group investigation” underway but do not know who is involved.
As far as Mellow was concerned, Wolman had spoken to him a few months after the disappearance. The two met on an island in French Polynesia where Wolman says Mellow lives with her mother.
“They printed this pamphlet with … every kind of religious extremism including the key word for Covid that you can think of from 666 and the mark of the beast to the Illuminati to George Soros to Bill Gates and nanobots and it’s … Wolman said. “He’s giving it to people in very poor countries are telling them or telling their children not to get vaccinated.”
Did Mellow take responsibility for what happened to Isaac Danian and Shukree Abdul-Rashed?
“They don’t take responsibility for what happened to them,” Wolman said. “He is calling them his brothers, saying that he died in the grace of God.”
Wolman said Mellow told her, “These were my dear friends. I loved them. I cried for months after they left.”
