The Disappearance of James Robert Harig: Part One

James Robert Harig, in an undated photo. COURTESY OF JAMES HARIG SEARCH GROUP

Originally published in the Pottsville Republican-Herald on February 5, 2022.

Everywhere you look, it’s the same photo. A shirtless, sunburnt, smiling man, wearing a red beanie and proudly holding a fish that he caught. The man in the photo is James Robert Harig, a Cumbola man who disappeared from the side of Sharp Mountain in Blythe Township ten years ago today. His mother Bernadette, sister Jessica and 8-year-old son Dylan never heard from him again. Among them, and all those still searching for James, the photo has become iconic. It is on every missing persons poster. It is plastered all over the James Harig Search Group, a Facebook group with over 700 followers. It is also Bernadette’s Facebook profile picture.

“He was a fisherman,” said Bernadette, 59, “he loved fishin’. I just want them to remember my son, don’t ever forget my son. James was my baby.”

Bernadette lives in a house on the edge of Tamaqua with her friend Joe Franko. It is the house of an outdoorsman, from the fish-shaped picture frames to the deer on the shower curtain. It is a constant reminder of James, who loved to hunt and fish.

There are no pictures of James on display. It hurts too much for Bernadette to look at them. She cries every time she hears the name James. Sometimes, she looks out of her window at the mountains surrounding Tamaqua, and cries. She imagines her son on that mountain, cold and alone. He was afraid of the dark.

“I just want closure,” she says. “Closure for him, closure for myself, closure for my daughter. I just want my son home. I beg people, tell me where my son is so he can come home. That’s what I want!”

Bernadette in her Tamaqua home. Joe Franko stands in the doorway. PHOTO BY WES CIPOLLA

Most of what the public thinks it knows about the disappearance of James Robert Harig is wrong. A missing poster of James from the website lostnmissing.com has almost 300 shares on Facebook, but when I showed Bernadette the poster, she was stunned by its inaccuracies. The poster describes James as a white male, 25 years old at the time of his disappearance. He is 5’11” tall, weighs 180 pounds, has brown hair, brown eyes, a scar above his right eye and a scar on his chin. He had two tattoos, one on the inside of his left leg reading “Dylan” and one on the outside of his right leg reading “FTW.” (“For the Win”) That’s all the poster got right. Everything else, including the people James was with when he disappeared, is incorrect.

Sitting in her living room, Bernadette and Dylan, who is now 18, recounted James’ life, his disappearance and Bernadette’s own decade-long investigation into what happened. In a pink Penn State folder, she keeps notes and “evidence” about her son. She says she does so because nobody else is helping her.

“My relationship with the police isn’t that good,” she said. “I feel that they keep things from me. I feel more could’ve been done in the beginning to find out more.”

“I personally and our department are empathetic to Mrs. Harig and James’ family,” said Pottsville Police Chief Richard Wojciechowsky. “But any kind of statement that the Pottsville Police did not do everything they could for her, and continue to look into any matters related to this, is simply not true.”

Dylan, a senior at Pottsville Area High School, has recently joined the search for his father.

“I don’t believe it’s been 10 years,” he said. “I wanna find my dad, I wanna lay him to rest. It’s been ten years, I’m kind of a young adult now.”

The Sunday before I sat down with them, Bernadette and Dylan searched a rural area of Schuylkill County for any trace of James, based on the word of a Facebook tipster.

“It was like 10 degrees and that wind was whippin’,” Bernadette said, “but we were out there. Whatever someone sends me, I search. My family says I shouldn’t do it, but I don’t care. I do it. It’s my son.”

Dylan studies carpentry at Schuylkill Technology Center, just like his dad did. Bernadette loves Dylan’s big eyes. They’re his father’s eyes. James carried a picture of Dylan everywhere he went - except for the day he disappeared.

“I was small and I didn’t really understand it,” Dylan said, “so I kind of pushed it aside after all these years. Now I realize I shouldn’t have. It sucks, growing up without a father.”

Bernadette and Dylan look over their notes on James' disappearance. PHOTO BY WES CIPOLLA

After ten years, there have been no suspects, no leads and only one clue - a shocking photograph which reignited the investigation into James’ disappearance last year. Eyewitness testimony is all anyone has to go on - not even James’ last location can be independently confirmed, because he didn’t have his cell phone on him at the time. A decade of lies, misinformation and unanswered questions have baffled both the Harig family and the Pottsville Police Department.

“Does it puzzle me?” Wojciechowsky said. “Absolutely. It disturbs me. Any case, you want to bring to a conclusion. This case, where there are family members searching for answers, magnifies that even more. But we as police certainly don’t have a magic wand to make that occur.”

James Robert Harig was born in Pottsville in 1986. Bernadette has fond memories of young James fishing and riding four-wheelers with his father Charles, who died by suicide in 2011, and his brother Charles Jr., who died of a drug overdose in 2016.

“They were so happy,” she said. “It’s just heartbreaking that somebody could take him and disregard him, just throw him away.”

James graduated from Pottsville Area High School and worked various odd jobs, but none lasted long. He struggled with drug addiction and was in rehab twice.

“I had fun with him when he was here,” said Dylan, who remembers playing football in the backyard with his dad. “He was nice to me, he was funny. I liked him, he was great.”

The last time Bernadette saw her son alive, it was from the back window of her home in Cumbola. She gave him a hug, a kiss and a letter from the unemployment office.

“And then he left,” she said, “and I never saw him again.”

It is generally agreed upon that on February 5, 2012, James entered a car with his cousin Tony Fanelli and a woman named Michelle Seidel. Eyewitnesses claimed to have seen James, Fanelli and Seidel in locations throughout Schuylkill County that day. Fanelli and Seidel said that James climbed to the top of a hill and said “This is a great place to get lost!” That, they said, was the last they ever saw of him.

Bernadette did not file a missing persons report until February 29. James had “gone off the grid” (in Wojciechowsky’s words) before, but always reappeared unharmed. Bernadette started asking about her son’s whereabouts, but got the same response from everyone: “He’s around.”

When James wasn’t around for his 26th birthday on the 19th, Bernadette grew suspicious. 10 days later, she filed a report with officer Joseph Leskin of the Blythe Township Police Department (Leskin, now retired, declined to be interviewed). One month later, the case was transferred to the Schuylkill County District Attorney’s office and the Pottsville Police. For the next year, they, as well as James’ friends and family, conducted extensive searches of Sharp Mountain.

“We searched that mountain all the way from Henry Clay to the Sheetz at Gordon Nagle,” Bernadette said.

“Every time there is or was a search for him,” said Patrick Hill of New Philadelphia, James’ friend since the third grade, “I was there. And I will be there until he is returned to us. He would give you the shirt off his back to help you.”

Bernadette believes that her son was murdered. Why, she asks, would he leave his beloved son?

“I read papers from his rehab,” she said, “and his number one goal was to be a better father.”

Hill remembers a “look of pure happiness” on James’ face when he found out he was going to be a father.

“I miss him so much,” Hill said. “I strongly believe that someone knows what happened to him and where he is, but are afraid to come out and say anything because of the fear of retaliation for themselves and their family.”

After his father disappeared, Dylan switched between living with his mother, Melissa Correll, and living with his grandparents. He once dreamt that he was with his father again, in Bernadette’s truck. James stopped the truck and went into a house, and Dylan followed him through the open door. Dylan saw his father laying on the couch, unconscious.

“I just froze up,” Dylan remembered, “and watched him there.”

Then he woke up.

Along with ground searches, the Pottsville Police extensively interviewed James’ friends, family and acquaintances. Bernadette did the same. She has talked to countless people, but has learned nothing. She has consulted with psychics, who tell her that James is “close to home.” She has searched, often alone, through rural mountain areas of Schuylkill County to find her son’s remains or personal belongings.

“Maybe it’s just wishful thinkin’,” she said. “Maybe someday I will find something. I was told by the Pottsville Police that I shouldn’t be meeting these people, these names that I hear about my son. Some of these places weren’t too good. I don’t care if I lose my life. At least I died trying to bring my son back home.”

Tipsters have told her lurid stories of James being stuffed in a woodchipper, fed to pigs, dipped in acid and put in a dumpster. The stories are never true, but she investigates every last one. Once, she heard that a New Philadelphia man was keeping James’ remains in his freezer. She went to the man’s house and asked to look in his freezer. He let her look, and she found nothing.

“I have so many suspicions,” she said. “People told me so much stuff, so many horror stories, I feel that I can’t trust anyone anymore… I have no clue what to believe anymore.”

Her friend Joe Franko called it “a sick joke.”

“There’s so many stories over 10 years, your head would spin,” he said. “I think she’s gonna have a nervous breakdown pretty soon. I don’t know a mother’s instinct. I know a father’s instinct. If it was my son, I’d never stop searching, either.”

Pottsville Police have also heard many false, sensational accounts of James’ death. Chief Wojciechowsky compares it to the kindergarten game of “telephone.”

“In any case that drags on,” he said, “stories are told, hearsay becomes double hearsay, then into triple hearsay. In spite of that, anything that is brought to our attention, we have vetted.”

There is a piece of paper taped to the wall of Wojciechowsky’s office. It reads “You’re absolutely entitled to your own opinion. But, you’re not entitled to base it on incorrect information.”

On January 12, Bernadette made a post on the “Nosey Neighbors of Schuylkill County” Facebook group. She said that she won her appeal with the State of Pennsylvania to get access to information the Pottsville Police had on her son. According to the information she received, an anonymous individual claimed to have seen James get shot in the head while sitting on a sofa - an image straight out of Dylan’s dream. Wojciechowsky said this allegation was proven false, but Bernadette and Dylan still believe it to be true.

“Seven years after he went missing,” Bernadette said, “and they’re saying this, and the cops don’t believe them? Then you wonder why I don’t trust them.”

She also made a right to know request to the City of Pottsville, which was denied. In a subsequent conversation with Chief Wojciechowsky, she told him “You didn’t help me in the past ten years, why would you help me now?”

“She’s angry because she wants answers,” Wojciechowsky said. “Anniversaries make it even worse. But I have kept an open line of communication with Mrs. Harig.”

For nine years since James Robert Harig’s disappearance, Bernadette and Pottsville Police have gone on an endless series of what Franko calls “wild goose chases.” It appeared that the case had run cold. That is, until the summer of 2021, when a mysterious photograph would reignite the investigation and make the mystery of James Robert Harig even more convoluted.

The conclusion of this story will be published on February 6, 2022.