Just last week, TikTok sleuths were tracking the disappearance of Hannah Kobayashi — a 30-year-old Hawaiian woman who went missing after she was supposed to travel to New York with her ex boyfriend. Her family found out that she had never gotten on her connecting flight after they received some really weird, confusing texts from her phone using language that her family said sounded nothing like her. She had been seen on different surveillance cameras around Los Angeles (where she was supposed to take her connecting flight from) but hasn’t been seen since November 11, one day before her family declared her missing.
Hannah’s father, Ryan Kobayashi, traveled to Los Angeles in an attempt to find his daughter. He spent 13 days looking for her, using as many clues and resources as he could. And then on Sunday, November 24, Ryan was found dead in a parking lot.
Ryan was 58 years old, and medical examiners determined that he had died by suicide — though an official “cause of death” was not released. It was reported that he had jumped off of the parking structure near Los Angeles International Airport at some time after 4am.
A statement from the Kobayashi family reads: “The Kobayashi family endured a devastating tragedy today. After tirelessly searching throughout Los Angeles for 13 days, Hannah’s father, Ryan Kobayashi, tragically took his own life. This loss has compounded the family’s suffering immeasurably.”
But the family still urges people to continue the search for Hannah. Their belief is that she’s still missing and in immediate danger, as the last videos they saw of her via surveillance cameras appear to show her in a state that’s unlike “her normal self.” She was also seen traveling with a man that was not her ex-boyfriend, compounding the family’s reasons to believe that she’s in danger. Aside from the bizarre texts they’ve received from her, they also noticed that she made two recent Venmo payments to people they don’t recognize.
There have been no official updates in Hannah’s case, but support for finding her has seemed to become even more apparent after the news of her father’s passing was publicized.
