Produced by the iLab at WBUR Boston.

This is a story about a young man named Jason.

But you're never going to hear from Jason.

You're just going to hear from people who knew him.

Or thought they knew him.

The first person you're going to hear from who knew Jason or thought that he knew Jason

is a guy named Isaac Hensley.

He's a nurse.

Also a dad, I should include dad.

I'm a dad that takes up as much time as the nursing part.

Isaac's a dad now.

But in the summer of 1994, he was a teenager growing up in Champagne, Illinois, who had

just started to dip his toe into partying, which meant that his dad, who was an evangelical

pastor, wanted Isaac to spend his summer break somewhere else, doing something productive.

That somewhere else was a Myrtle Beach in South Carolina, and that something productive

was a youth leadership program with some other young energetic Christian teenage boys.

I was not very into the church.

So I went out there to kind of cool off of the summer, and none of these other young people

that went out there for this church leadership thing were too into partying.

And so I spent a lot of time with the beach.

One day while teenage Isaac was escaping the religious agenda of his summer vacation

by walking down the beach, he ran into another kid walking the other way.

...