For most, the chaos of the holiday season has come and gone. But for Wendy Davis, the chaos of the last month and a half has nothing to do with the holidays.
Wendy’s father, 59-year-old Dan Davis, has been missing since just before Thanksgiving.
Around 1:15 a.m. on November 25, he was seen leaving 115 Bourbon Street, the nightclub he worked at in Merrionette Park, a suburb of Chicago. Dan has been the head lighting designer there for 25 years.
It was his manager and close friend who reported him missing to the Chicago Police Department after he didn’t show up to a planned hang-out with his friends on November 24, and wasn’t answering his phone all day on the 25th.
“I got a call from his close friends that, you know, ‘We can’t find your dad,’” Wendy told Dateline.
According to Wendy, her father is incredibly passionate about his work, and hasn’t missed a day of work in those 25 years. “He’s never called in sick, he’s never taken a vacation. He is really dedicated to it,” Wendy said.
“My dad is just a huge goofball,” Wendy said. “Most of the memories that I share with my dad growing up are just stupid, silly — just us laughing until we cry about things that only we think are funny.”
The family believes Dan experienced a possible stroke or medical event that left him confused and disoriented before his disappearance. Upon checking Dan’s apartment in the south side of Chicago, his family noticed certain things out of place. “His fridge was left open, the windows were left open in November, and there was, like, a broken plate of food on the ground in the kitchen,” Wendy explained. According to Wendy, the apartment building’s security footage also showed Dan knocking on and trying to open his neighbors’ doors before driving away in his car around 11:00 p.m. on November 24.
At 11:30 p.m. that evening, Dan was involved in a head-on collision, which took place near 115 Bourbon Street. Both cars’ airbags went off, and both cars were totaled, according to Wendy. She says Dan was not injured and refused medical attention multiple times at the scene. The family has seen the body cam footage from the scene and Wendy says it shows her father speaking coherently with responding officers. The family did notice what Wendy calls some “slip-ups” in his behavior that they believe could be subtle stroke symptoms. “We don’t blame the police for looking this over,” she said. “They don’t know what my dad’s baseline is.”
Dan’s car was towed from the scene, so officers dropped him off at 115 Bourbon Street. The bodycam footage of Dan exiting their vehicle and walking toward the entrance of the club shows him appearing to struggle with his balance, specifically with his left leg, which Wendy says is not his usual gait.
According to Wendy, Dan was let into the building by two employees who were cleaning up at the end of the night but barely interacted with them. “He starts pacing around and acting weird,” Wendy reported them as saying. However, “he said hi and goodbye, so that’s why they didn’t think anything was wrong with him.”
Dan left 115 Bourbon Street around 1:15 a.m. on November 25. According to Wendy, a community service officer saw him walking down the middle of the road before honking at him to get out of the road. That was the last confirmed eyewitness sighting of Dan.
Dan was seen several times on home security video during the day of the 25th in the city of Blue Island, a few miles south of Merrionette Park. Dan would be familiar with Blue Island since his best friend lives there and he frequently visits the area to spend time with him. “We’re thinking he’s wandering around trying to get to this friend’s house,” Wendy told Dateline. But according to Wendy, it was apparent that he was disoriented and physically inhibited. Dan was caught on video tripping over a yard sign, “in a really odd way that nobody would be walking,” she said. And again, “we notice his left leg in particular is giving him problems.”
The next day, November 26, Dan was seen on security footage entering and exiting a church in Blue Island at around 6:30 p.m. “He never sat down, he never talked to anyone,” Wendy said. “That’s the last day we see him on camera.”
In the weeks since that late November day, there has been no sign of Dan Davis anywhere. “We’re stumped in the sense of how he just vanished,” Wendy said.
The search for Dan has been extensive, both on the ground and across social media. Wendy started making TikTok videos that have gained significant traction, amassing more than 12 million views so far. “The main positive to all of this was just how much it’s grown, how many eyes that we’ve gotten from online,” Wendy said. “People in surrounding states, surrounding neighborhoods, and people who live in Blue Island are offering their help.”
The search team has focused their efforts on Blue Island in-depth. According to Wendy, they’ve searched areas where Dan was seen, as well as abandoned houses, wooded areas, and bodies of water. “All surrounding law enforcement departments are on high alert and are helping us to the best of their abilities as well,” Wendy said.
On November 27, 2025, the Chicago Police Department posted a missing person flyer for Dan on its website. The flyer notes that Dan “may be in need of medical attention.” He is listed as an endangered missing person. Dateline reached out to the Chicago Police Department’s public information office to ask for any updates in the case, but was told the flyer contains the most recent information available to the public.
SAR Sheps and Code 3 Search and Rescue, two professional search and rescue teams from Ohio, volunteered their services over this past weekend, bringing with them canines and a team of 20 people who are professionally trained to search in bodies of water and wooded areas.
“They were not able to find anything, but they were super highly-coordinated and went about it so gracefully,” Wendy told Dateline. “Which is I guess kind of good because they’re looking for the stuff we don’t wanna find.”
Wendy feels her dad may have left the Blue Island area by now. She encourages people to check their cameras and security footage, and to send anything that resembles Dan to their email: [email protected]. There’s a $500 reward for any confirmed videos of Dan taken after 6:30 p.m. on November 26, 2025.
Wendy is singularly focused on telling her dad’s story and sharing the information of his last-known whereabouts. “I don’t think he realized how much of a light he is, too. Every room that he’s in, everyone that he’s around,” she said. “He is just so valued by everyone, and I think he assumes he’s not as important as he really is.”
“What we don’t want to happen is that this rolls out of the news and people forget about it, and then we lose our momentum and he is never found. And that’s just what we can’t let happen,” Wendy told Dateline. “And I’m already so extremely grateful for everybody online caring as much as they [have] for a total stranger.”
Dan Davis is 59 years old, 5’7’’, and weighs 165 lbs. He was last seen in a black Harley Davidson jacket with white stripes on the sleeves. He was wearing a red Indiana University hoodie, black jeans, and brown hiking boots.
If you have information on Dan’s whereabouts, please contact the Chicago Police Department at 312-747-8274.
If you have a story to share with Dateline, please submit it here.
