A Brainerd man fled deputies five years ago. He hasn’t been seen since.

OUTING, MINN. - Cass County Sheriff Bryan Welk spotted a familiar face on a northbound motorcycle in busy Fourth of July weekend traffic.

It was Jami Lucas, who he grew up with in nearby Remer. Welk knew Lucas, with a lengthy criminal history, didn’t have a valid license. Deputies tried to pull him over, but Lucas fled. A pursuit on Hwy. 6 before sunset on July 3, 2020, led to a winding dirt road where the motorcycle was abandoned in a ditch and a deputy saw Lucas run into the woods. The deputy, with his gun drawn, gave commands to stop and come out.

Five years later, Lucas hasn’t been seen since.

“Where the hell is he?” Welk said in a recent interview at his office in Walker.

Friends and family accuse law enforcement of not doing enough to find Lucas. They say deputies shouldn’t have initiated a high-speed chase in busy holiday traffic over a minor violation when they knew where they could find Lucas. Now he’s nowhere to be found.

But the sheriff and Cass County Attorney Ben Lindstrom maintain that Lucas should never have fled, and his decision to do so caused these years of uncertainty and worry.

“We certainly want to see people reconnected and have finality, but I guess what I’ve seen is attacks on law enforcement suggesting that this is their fault that somebody ran from them, and I think that’s misplaced,” Lindstrom said.

Methamphetamines and messy family dynamics further muddy the Lucas mystery.

Sandy Lucas said she has accepted that her son is dead, that he never left the woods that night, but she wants answers.

“They’re all crooked,” she said of the deputies who were the last to see her son. But she’s suspicious of relatives and others who were with Lucas that day, too. One is in prison and couldn’t be reached for comment. Lucas’ ex-girlfriend and the mother of his children didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Only when the Minnesota Star Tribune recently began looking into the case did Lucas’ family and friends learn that a sixth deputy was at the scene that night: Lucas’s cousin, deputy Aaron Ammerman.

Ammerman never filed a report like the other deputies on the scene. Welk said he was riding in Ammerman’s squad with a boat on the hitch when they both saw Lucas on the motorcycle. They radioed to other deputies to pull Lucas over.

“I didn’t do anything in that call,” Ammerman said in an interview. “By the time we got there he was already gone in the woods. … We didn’t stay there the whole time because we had to be out on the water for the fireworks display that night.”

He added: " It’s a family of conspiracy people."

A nationwide warrant was issued after Lucas fled and didn’t report back to his probation officer. He was reported as missing and charged with fleeing police and has other pending charges out of Crow Wing County.

“Holding him accountable for the criminal cases are secondary,” Welk said. “We need to find him; that’s the first and foremost.”

Searches over the years haven’t turned up any clues. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) and Sheriff’s Office conducted a search in June. Still nothing.

They didn’t spend much time searching for Lucas because they figured he would turn up, Welk said. Lucas has three young children and his family all lives in the area. He said deputies had no reason to suspect that Lucas fleeing police would evolve into a missing persons case.

But a BCA missing persons bulletin for Lucas wasn’t posted until December 2024 after Lucas’ friend filed a complaint of misconduct with local and state agencies that October.

The Cass County website doesn’t list Lucas as a missing person, only an elderly man who disappeared in 2009.

“Why isn’t Jami on there?” said Tanda Glaser, the friend who has been maintaining a Facebook page to find Lucas for more than a year and keeps pressure on law enforcement, which ramped up around the five-year anniversary of Lucas’ disappearance.

That’s when the Sheriff’s Office first shared a detailed missing persons report about Lucas on Facebook. Some commented on the post about how it was odd the agency was just now sharing information about Lucas.

His ex-girlfriend had an order for protection against him at the time but was still with him the day of the pursuit, driving behind him.

Glaser filed complaints asking for another agency to investigate, and the BCA was brought in this summer.

She said her concern and reasoning for the complaints is a lack of documentation. There is no dash-camera footage. Only two of the six deputies have bodycam video footage, snippets of which are available online. Lucas appears in none of it.

Welk said his interview with Lucas’ ex-girlfriend at the scene wasn’t recorded on his body camera. Another deputy activated emergency squad lights in the pursuit, which automatically turns on dashcams, but Welk said the system “crashed and could not recover any data.”

Sandy Lucas believes her son was forced off the road and crashed, but there’s allegedly no footage to show what happened in those moments leading up to the foot chase into the woods.

Sandy Lucas placed a memorial cross at the site this summer. She stopped by recently, fighting off horseflies and mosquitoes to tuck yellow wildflowers in the cross.

“I just want to find my son’s remains,” she said.

If you have any information regarding Jami Lucas, contact the Cass County Sheriff’s Office at 218-547-1424 or Crime Stoppers at 800-222-8477.