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(NewsNation) — The father of missing autistic teenager Sebastian Rogers is suing two government agencies for $25 million in damages and wants the case reopened.
Seth Rogers filed two federal lawsuits naming the Sumner County Sheriff’s Office and the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services, alleging both agencies failed his son.
Sebastian Rogers, then 15, was last seen Feb. 25, 2024, at the Hendersonville, Tennessee, home of his mother, Katie Proudfoot, and her husband, Chris Proudfoot.
The night before his disappearance, his mother said she heard a loud bang come from his room. She yelled to check on him, and he responded that he was all right.
Proudfoot woke up Feb. 26, 2024, to find that her son was not in his bed. She then searched the entire house, the neighborhood and his school to no avail. His shoes and cellphone were left behind.
Sebastian was reported missing the same day, marking the beginning of a massive interagency search effort that has so far yielded no results.
Investigators searched more than 2,000 square miles, but just a week after Sebastian’s disappearance, authorities announced they were scaling back that ground search.
The lawsuit against the Sumner County Sheriff’s Office alleges the investigation was mishandled, claiming detectives failed to properly secure the home as a potential crime scene, given that they assigned only one detective to Sebastian’s missing-person case.
The second lawsuit alleges the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services failed to protect Sebastian, despite investigating his household twice before he disappeared.
Another allegation made was that investigators never determined why security cameras at the home weren’t working the day Sebastian disappeared. There is another allegation Katie Proudfoot installed and operated security cameras for a living.
“What I think is very interesting about this, and I really commend Seth on this, is it’s going to force discovery. So by suing the Department of Family Services and suing the Sumner County Sheriff’s office, it could possibly lead to reports that he wasn’t aware about, reports from those investigations, interviews that took place,” crime reporter Justin Shepherd told “Jesse Weber Live.”
“Things that were never released during the investigation that could possibly shed some more light on it. It might give him some more answers as to what went wrong at the very beginning of this, because, here we are a couple of years later and there’s no more answers than when he went missing,” he added.
Sebastian was 5 feet, 5 inches tall and around 110 to 115 pounds when he was last seen. He has brown hair and eyes that look hazel or brown, according to the FBI.
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