Marshal Iwaasa was a man with a plan when he left his hometown of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, in 2018 and enrolled at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT) in Calgary, about two hours north.

He was 25 years old and had spent the last 6 years working construction and manual labor jobs. Studying computer programming at SAIT would give him the ability to earn an easier living than the rigorous work he’d been doing.

His family knew him to laugh easily, and his nieces and nephews knew him as the fun uncle. He was close to his older sister and had a soft spirit, according to his mother, Tammy. She didn’t know that Nov. 17, 2019, was the last time she’d see her son. Marshal made the two-hour trek from Calgary to Lethbridge and he dropped in at his mom’s house about 10:30 that evening before he went to his storage unit to pick up a few items. They visited briefly and she urged him to stay the night instead of making the late-night drive back. Marshal refused, insisting that he had things he needed to take care of back in Calgary.

The phone call from police came nine days later on Nov. 26. Tammy was in Hawaii with her daughter when authorities called to say that they’d found Marshal’s truck at a trailhead in the forest outside Pemberton, British Columbia, a 14-hour drive from Lethbridge. His belongings were scattered around the area, and the truck had been burned so severely that the tires had melted and the paint had sloughed off. Even worse, there was no sign of Marshal in or around the vehicle.

Investigators ruled it a suicide, citing the discovery that Marshal had withdrawn from school. That, they said, was evidence that he was depressed. Tammy felt blaming it on suicide gave the police an easy out on the investigation — if Marshal was responsible for his own death, there was nothing to investigate.

Marshal’s family insisted, however, that there was no way he’d have driven his truck nearly four miles into the forest, nor would he have harmed himself. With the police unconvinced there was anything to investigate, the family took matters into their own hands and began looking for surveillance footage that might shed some light on where Marshal was.

The storage center had already erased the Nov. 17 and 18 surveillance tapes by the time Marshal’s family got there, but they were able to confirm that Marshall entered the wrong gate code to enter the facility several times overnight before finally getting in just after 6 a.m. on Nov. 18. His family combed through his storage unit but found no clues about what had gone on. They also checked with gas stations and businesses along the most likely route between Lethbridge and Pemberton, but their surveillance footage from those days was also gone.

On Dec. 4, 2019, as snow began to blanket the area, authorities were forced to call off their formal search for Marshal.

The following summer, Marshal’s family as well as their private investigator and a team of searchers hiked to the spot where his truck was abandoned. The truck was still there, but the investigator noticed something suspicious: there was an open zippo lighter tucked between the seat and the console of the car, and the fire had clearly started in the passenger compartment. No matter what else had happened on the mountain, the fire in the truck had been intentionally set. The searchers used a cadaver dog to search a three mile radius around Marshal’s truck but the search was fruitless.

There was, however, a strange digital clue: as the grieving family sent occasional messages to Marshal’s Snapchat account, they realized that the messages were occasionally being marked as “read” as if someone had Marshal’s phone and was opening the Snapchat notifications.

Despite the evidence, Lethbridge police have maintained that while the disappearance is suspicious, there is not enough information to consider the case a criminal matter unless Marshal’s body or DNA is recovered.

If Marshal Iwaasa is still alive, he would be 30 years old as of 2023. If you have any information about his disappearance or his whereabouts, please call the Lethbridge, British Columbia, Police Department at 403-328-4444 or Crimestoppers at 800-222-8477.

For more on this case, stream Still A Mystery: “What the Trees Know” on Max.