It’s been almost two years since Heather Allen saw her son, Roy Tsatoke, who went missing in a vast, rural area of Humboldt County, California, in September 2024.
This time of year is hard for Heather. “There’s certain times where you can always count on your kids coming home or calling,” Heather told Dateline. “You know, for Roy, it was if there was food being prepared, his birthday, Mother’s Day.”
But Mother’s Day came and went again this year without Roy.
Roy grew up in Redding, California, with his mom and dad, who was a member of the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma. His father’s side of the family lived on the Hoopa Valley Reservation in Humboldt County, and Roy grew up surrounded by family, often spending time with his aunts, uncles, and cousins on the reservation. Friendly and easy-going, Roy is loved by all, according to his mother. “He’s always smiling. He’s always been that way ever since he was a baby,” Heather said. “Just a real happy guy.”
Before his disappearance, 26-year-old Roy was a tour guide at the Lake Shasta Caverns and worked for a Redding realtor. Heather says the guide job was a perfect fit for her son, a natural people-person. “He likes to get a razz out of people, you know, teasing around for a good laugh,” she said. “You could always count on that from Roy.”
At the time he went missing, Roy was staying with a friend in the Eureka area of Humboldt County, where he was trying to secure permanent housing. “He had been in Humboldt probably around two weeks,” Heather said. “Before that, he lived on my property in Redding.”
Heather last spoke to her son on the phone on September 17, 2024, while she was in Texas visiting her grandchildren. Roy told her he was going to be house-sitting in McKinleyville, California, from September 19 to 23. “He mentioned that he may go and stay with family at Hoopa for a couple days,” she recalled. “But after he was finished house-sitting, his plan was to come back over to Redding and pick up some mail that he was expecting.”
The home Roy was house-sitting belonged to an ex-girlfriend’s mother. “He retained a friendship with his ex-girlfriend’s mother after they broke up,” Heather said. “His relationship with his ex-girlfriend’s mother was better than what he had with the ex-girlfriend.”
Around 7:00 a.m. on September 23, 2024, Heather saw she had a text from Roy from the previous evening. She was immediately concerned by it. “The message was apologetic and basically said, you know, that he’s not my problem anymore,” she said. “The way he addressed me — it addressed me — didn’t sound like Roy.”
According to Heather, the tone of the text made her feel like Roy wasn’t the one who wrote it. “The text was very direct,” Heather said. “That’s not how Roy communicates with me if he were in crisis or upset.”
From the moment Heather read the message, she started calling Roy, trying to get in touch with him. “I tried calling him probably 10 times, and it went straight to voicemail each time,” she said.
Heather and her daughter started the three-hour drive from Redding to Humboldt County. “I just had this feeling inside of my body that was not anything I’d ever felt before,” Heather said. “I knew something was wrong.”
She called the friend Roy had been staying with in Eureka, but she hadn’t heard from him since he left to go house-sitting. Based on her last conversation with Roy, Heather knew he possibly had plans to go to the Hoopa Reservation. “I went there, and nobody had seen or heard from Roy,” she said. “So I proceeded on to McKinleyville.”
Heather says when she got to the house where Roy had been house-sitting, she found the homeowner, Roy’s ex-girlfriend’s mother, in the driveway. “When I asked her where Roy was,” Heather recalled, “she said that he went to go do his thing.” According to Heather, the homeowner told her she had only returned from her out-of-town trip 10 minutes earlier.
Dateline has been unable to locate the homeowner or her daughter, Roy’s ex-girlfriend, for comment.
“I was becoming increasingly more distraught,” Heather said. “Losing my mind by the minute, not being able to get a hold of my son.” Roy’s sister and the friend he had been staying with went to the Arcata Police Department, where they filed a missing person’s report. Heather stayed near the McKinleyville residence to meet with the Sheriff’s deputies, but she had a specific request for law enforcement. “I asked right away that they issue a Feather Alert for Roy, because he is Native American, and he’s a federally recognized tribal member,” Heather said.
Dateline spoke to Lieutenant Keith Altizer of the Arcata Police Department. Roy “was listed as a missing person upon report,” he said. However, the Feather Alert, a resource available to law enforcement agencies investigating missing Indigenous people, was delayed. Roy was part of the Kiowa tribe in Oklahoma, and the Arcata PD first had to coordinate with them. Roy’s case also had to meet Feather Alert criteria, and according to Altizer, it was at first unclear if Roy met those criteria. “There’s certain state criteria that is required for a Feather Alert that we were attempting to gather,” he said. “We didn’t necessarily have all that at the beginning.” Ultimately, the Feather Alert was issued by the California State Highway Patrol on October 2 — nine days after Roy was reported missing.
For Heather, those days were agonizing. “I begged them for a search and rescue effort, and they just kept telling me that Roy didn’t meet the criteria,” Heather said. “He absolutely met the criteria, and I brought that to their attention. And they just kept refusing.”
Details of Roy’s last known whereabouts were still emerging. Heather learned that on September 21, Roy went on a date. At the time of his disappearance, Roy was relying on ride-share apps because his car had been totaled. “That Uber driver reached out to me after seeing one of Roy’s flyers locally,” Heather said. “She had picked up my son and then picked up the female and dropped them off downtown.” The Arcata Police Department’s investigation also confirmed that Roy was on a date that evening.
Arcata PD established that Roy was last seen by his ex-girlfriend at the McKinleyville residence on September 22. “She had come by the house, and they had talked for a while,” Altizer said. The Department got a full statement from the ex-girlfriend, but Lt. Altizer would not describe any further details of that conversation.
Four other people — Roy’s older brother and three of his friends — received a text message similar in nature to the one Heather received from Roy on September 22. “Independently, all five of us had felt the same way, and that the messages did not come from Roy,” Heather said.
“It’s always a possibility,” Altizer said of Heather’s suspicions. “But we have uncovered no evidence of that.”
Some miscellaneous items belonging to Roy were located in the McKinleyville residence and retrieved by Arcata PD. However, Lt. Altizer says those items have little evidentiary value. Most of Roy’s personal effects were gone from the residence. The items found in the home were returned to Heather.
Altizer says they requested an exigent ping on Roy’s cellphone from his carrier. Getting an exigent ping meant they wouldn’t lose time waiting for a warrant in what was considered an emergency situation. The last signal on Roy’s phone was in the Willow Creek area in Humboldt County on the evening of September 22. “It’s a broad area, kind of along the highway right there,” Altizer said.
While the Arcata Police Department is the lead agency on the case, Humboldt County Sheriff’s deputies conducted initial searches in the Hoopa and Willow Creek areas. “Deputies checked that area and any surrounding areas, talking to people, seeing if anybody had seen him or heard from him,” Lt. Altizer said. Arcata PD checked the McKinleyville residence and spoke with the homeowner.
According to Altizer, nothing was found during those searches, and without a specific location identified in the Willow Creek area, law enforcement has yet to conduct a thorough ground search there. “It’s a vast wilderness area, and there was no specific indicators of where that search pattern could even begin.”
Heather tried to organize her own search the weekend after Roy disappeared. “My sister and I, we showed up early, you know, to get everything ready. And nobody showed up,” she said. “That was pretty devastating for me.”
The next weekend, they tried again, Heather says, and still no one showed up. On the third weekend after Roy’s disappearance, Heather’s extended family came and helped search. “My cousin was waist deep in the river, walking down the middle of the river when it dawned on me, you know, what we were out there looking for,” Heather said. The searches did not yield any evidence or sign of Roy.
For several weeks after Roy went missing, Heather camped in the Willow Creek area, “canvassing every day, you know, a different section of the highway and down towards the river,” she said. “I’ve been in Humboldt pretty much ever since, you know, looking in different areas.”
Investigators have not determined how Roy traveled from the McKinleyville residence to the Willow Creek area, which is about 40 miles east of the home and close to the Hoopa Reservation. “We’ve reached out to the community, seeing if anybody gave him a ride. We checked, you know, local cab companies or rideshare companies,” Altizer said. Law enforcement is confident Roy was in a moving vehicle when his phone last pinged, but “have not been able to attribute to who gave him a ride or how he was in a vehicle,” Altizer said.
The Arcata Police Department is looking for anyone who might have driven Roy on September 22 or seen him after he left the McKinleyville residence. “If anybody has information on who that person is, we’d love to be able to talk to them,” Altizer said. “Find out, you know, where they were going, if he had requested a ride, anything like that.”
Roy’s phone has not been found. His phone and bank accounts have shown no activity after September 22, 2024. “Everything ceases at that time. It’s a complete interruption of life,” Altizer said. “At this point, we do not have any evidence of foul play, but it is still under investigation.”
The Arcata Police Department has received tips of possible Roy sightings since he vanished, each of which Lt. Altizer says the department has followed up on, but none has led to Roy.
Heather Allen says the search for Roy has transformed her life. At the time of his disappearance, she was working three jobs, two of which were her own small businesses. She’s dropped everything to search for her son. “I walked away from my life,” she said. “I haven’t worked in 19 months. I don’t know how I still have my home. All I want to do is find my son.”
“Heather is passionate,” Lt. Altizer told Dateline. “But, I mean, if I was advocating for a missing loved one, you know, I would be passionate, too.”
Heather’s search has brought her face-to-face with other mothers searching for their missing children, all of them part of a club they don’t want to belong to. “I encountered other mothers that have been doing this longer than me,” Heather said. “I met one of the mothers, her daughter had been missing for three years. And I remember looking at her and her daughter, and thinking, ‘I’ll never make it three years doing this.’”
For Heather it’s now been nearly two years, and every single day has been a battle of grief, fear, and anger. But there is a special bond she shares with those other mothers of missing children. “You know, it’s true what they say about a mother. They’ll stop at nothing to find their children,” she said. “I just know I can’t move the rest of my days not knowing where he is or what happened to him.”
Heather has created a website to share updates about the search, along with photos and stories about Roy. “I don’t want him to be forgotten,” she said. Instead, she continues to search, advocate, and remember the good days — in particular, a day trip she took with Roy just a few weeks before he went missing.
“It was actually a really nice little road trip for my son and I,” she recalled. It was also the last day she saw him. “That was one of the best days I spent with Roy as an adult. And I just never, ever imagined it would’ve been the last time I’d see him.”
Roy Tsatoke is 5’11”, 149 lbs., with brown eyes, a mustache, and black, curly hair just past his shoulders. He would be 28 years old today. He was last seen wearing a black shirt with a maroon logo, black pants, and black shoes. He wore hoop earrings, a Native American headdress ring on his right pinky, and a ring on his middle finger.
If you have any information about Roy’s disappearance, please contact the Arcata Police Department at 707-822-2428, or use their anonymous tip line at 707-825-2588.
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