What Happened to Felipe Santos and Terrance Williams? They Mysteriously Vanished After the Traffic Stop
Both men went missing after separate encounters with the same police officer, Steven Calkins, in Collier County, Florida.
Even after years of investigations, neither Felipe nor Terrance has been found.
No one has ever been arrested, and their families are still left without answers or closure.
Let's get into the details
Background of the Case
Steven Calkins had been working with the Collier County Sheriff’s Office since 1987.
By the 2000s, he was a veteran officer, known for his strong build and calm, quiet personality.
Throughout his career, he had received recognition for saving lives and performing his duties effectively.
However, some of his colleagues said he was frustrated with the way the justice system worked.
According to CNN, Calkins believed that many of the people he detained were never truly held accountable.
He was reportedly upset that most of them were released on bail before he could even finish their paperwork.
By 2001, he had completely stopped making arrests.
Instead, he wrote hundreds of incident reports—without taking a single person to jail.
The Sheriff’s Office seemed unaware that Calkins had stopped making arrests.
Despite his empty arrest record for nearly three years, his supervisors kept rating his performance as satisfactory.
This oversight would later raise serious concerns about how closely the department was monitoring its deputies.
Asides his frustration for the justice system, some of his colleagues believed that, Calkins—who was white— strongly disliked people of color.
Then coincidentally, between 2003 and 2004, two men—Felipe Santos, who was Latino, and Terrance Williams, who was Black—disappeared under very similar circumstances.
Both were stopped by Deputy Steven Calkins, put into his patrol car, and were never seen again.
At first, the investigations treated the cases as separate, unrelated incidents.
However, people later noticed disturbing similarities in the two cases, which led many to suspect that Calkins was involved in their mysterious disappearances.
The Disappearance of Felipe Santos
In 2003, Felipe Santos, a 23-year-old immigrant from Oaxaca, Mexico, went missing in Florida.
On the morning of October 14, 2003, Santos was driving to his job at a concrete and masonry company in Naples, Florida, with two of his brothers in the car.
Around the intersection of Immokalee Road and Green Tree Boulevard, he got into a minor accident with a Mazda Protege driven by Camille Lach.
Although the accident was minor, Camille Lach called the police, and Corporal Steven Calkins arrived at the scene at 6:55 a.m.
He concluded that Santos was responsible for the crash, and also discovered that he didn’t have a driver’s license or insurance.
Calkins placed Santos in his patrol car and drove off—and that was the last time anyone saw him.
When Santos didn’t show up for work that morning, his coworkers and family grew concerned.
Believing that Santos had been arrested by Calkins, his family went to the police station—but there was no record of him.
Calkins claimed he gave Santos three traffic tickets and then drove him to a Circle K convenience store at the corner of Immokalee Road and Winterview Drive.
He said he released Santos there, telling him not to drive again until he had a valid license.
His family began searching hospitals and immigration detention centers after they didn’t see him at the station.
Their search and investigation eventually led them back to Calkins, the last known person to have seen Santos.
Santos' brother Jorge filed a formal complaint with the sheriff's office on October 29, 2003, alleging his brother had disappeared after being placed in Calkins' patrol car.
An internal affairs investigation was launched, and investigators later found several troubling inconsistencies in Calkins’ story:
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The signatures on Santos' traffic citations didn’t match his known handwriting. Two of the tickets listed his middle name as "Maximo" and one as "Medino," even though his actual middle name was "Maximino." A handwriting expert confirmed that the signatures weren’t written by Calkins either, leaving it unclear who actually signed the documents.
The timeline of events also raised concerns. Calkins said he cleared the accident scene at 7:35 a.m. and claimed he went to a morning briefing afterward, but there were no records showing he actually attended. Between 7:05 a.m. and 8:53 a.m.—when he next showed up at North Collier Hospital to file an unrelated report—Calkins’ whereabouts were unknown. This created an unexplained gap of nearly two hours.
After the internal investigation, Calkins was cleared of wrongdoing on December 2, 2003.
The lack of answers left Felipe Santos’ family heartbroken as they didint know what really happened to him.
His loved ones were very sure he wouldn’t have just vanished on his own—especially without reaching out about his newborn daughter.
He had a fiancée, a three-month-old baby, and was known as a reliable, hardworking man with no history of running away or abandoning his family.
While Felipe Santos’ family was still searching for answers, another man disappeared after an encounter with Officer Calkins just 41 days later.
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| Felipe Santos |
The Disappearance Of Terrance Williams
On January 12, 2004, Terrance Williams, a 27-year-old Black man, left his home in Naples, Florida, driving his white 1991 Cadillac.
He was supposed to start his shift at Pizza Hut at 10:00 a.m. that day.
Between 9:00 and 10:00 a.m., several people at Naples Memorial Gardens cemetery, including employees, saw Collier County Sheriff's Deputy Steven Calkins pull over Williams.
They watched as Calkins stopped Williams, searched him, put him in the back of his patrol car, and then drove away.
Williams never arrived at work, and he was never seen again.
His mother, Marcia Williams, became worried when he didn’t come home or call her, something he normally wouldn’t do.
As she looked for him, she found out that his Cadillac had been towed from the cemetery..
The tow report showed that Calkins had approved the car to be towed, but there was no police report recording the traffic stop or Williams’ detention.
Marcia went back to workers at the cemetery, who told her they saw Calkins stop Williams and ask for his ID, which Williams didn’t have.
The employees said Calkins then searched Williams and put him in the back of his patrol car.
Before driving away, Calkins asked them if he could leave Williams’ Cadillac in the lot, as reported by Wikipedia.
Later, between fifteen minutes and an hour later, Calkins reportedly returned to move the car from the parking lot to the side of the road.
The car keys were found on the ground nearby.
After hearing this, the Williams family kept calling the sheriff’s department, asking to speak with Calkins.
When dispatch reached him, Calkins said he didn’t remember making any arrests or towing cars that day.
He was contacted again later, and this time he claimed he remembered what happened with Williams.
A few days after that, Calkins’ supervisors asked him to write an incident report.
According to Calkins’ report, he said he first saw Williams at 12:15 p.m., after noticing that Williams’ car seemed to be having trouble.
Calkins said he followed Williams to the cemetery parking lot and that Williams asked for a ride to a nearby Circle K convenience store because he was late for work (even though Williams didn’t actually work there).
Calkins said that after dropping Williams off at Circle K, Williams told him the car’s paperwork was in the glove compartment.
Calkins said he went back and checked the car, but the registration wasn’t there.
Feeling tricked, he called Circle K from his work phone and asked to speak with Williams.
The clerk told him over the phone that Williams didn’t work there.
However, no witnesses or surveillance cameras ever confirmed that Williams was dropped off at the Circle K.
Also, his phone records showed that he never called the Circle K as he claimed.
He claimed the stop happened around 12, but the cemetery workers said the stop happened around 9 or 10 a.m., which matches the time Williams was supposed to start work at 10 a.m.
After a recording of his call to dispatch about Williams’ arrest was discovered, more doubts about Calkins came up.
In the call, he said the car was abandoned and blocking the road, according to Wikipedia.
However, this did not match his official report or the witnesses’ statements, which said that Calkins himself moved the car from the cemetery to the road.
During the call, Calkins joked, “Maybe he’s out there in the cemetery. He’ll come back and his car will be gone.”
He also used foul language, calling the car a “homie Cadillac” and a “piece of junk Cadillac.”
When investigators confronted him about this unprofessional call, Calkins said he was just joking with a coworker.
He also said he moved the car to help the towing company, not to make it look abandoned.
Calkins also said in the call that the car was broken down, and was blocking the road, but Williams’ family disagreed, because a family member was drove it home from the tow yard.
About 20 minutes later, Calkins radioed dispatch to run a background check on "Terrance D. Williams" using a birth date of April 1, 1975.
However, this wasn’t Williams’ real birthday—it was a false date he had occasionally given to police in the past.
Most importantly, this contradicts Calkins's earlier statement that he never knew Williams's last name or any other personal details.
After this call, Calkins was unaccounted for nearly an hour, which raised more suspicions.
What Happened to Steven Calkins After Terrance Williams' Disappearance?
After Terrance Williams' disappearance, Steven Calkins remained employed by the Collier County Sheriff's Office for several months while internal investigations unfolded.
Detectives tried to connect the dots between what happened to Williams and Felipe Santos, who had disappeared in similar situations just three months earlier.
In August 2004, seven months after Williams disappeared, Sheriff Don Hunter fired Calkins because he no longer trusted him to accurately remember and report incidents.
The termination letter said Calkins couldn’t be relied on to give truthful testimony in court, which is essential for any law enforcement officer.
However, the sheriff’s office never publicly accused Calkins of any crime.
He was not arrested in connection to the disappearances because investigators didn’t find direct evidence tying him to either case.
After he was fired, Calkins worked at a UPS facility in Florida until March 2013, according to CNN.
He left under tense conditions, after supervisors said he was verbally abusive when confronted about mishandling packages.
In 2016, Calkins and his wife sold their Florida home and relocated to Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
That same year, with permission from the new homeowners, investigators conducted an extensive search of Calkins' former Florida property.
However, the search did not find any DNA evidence or other useful forensic clues.
Calkins has never been criminally charged in connection with either disappearance.
He hired a lawyer and has always declined interviews with police and the media about the cases.
In 2020, when Terrance Williams’ family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against him, Calkins used his Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination during questioning.
The lawsuit was later dismissed because of lack of enough evidence.
As of recent reports by CNN, Calkins still lives in Iowa.
The Collier County Sheriff’s Office keeps an open case file on both disappearances, but there is no active investigation happening right now.
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| Steven Calkins |
Possible Theories
1) The Sheriff's Department has one theory: both men left on their own to avoid trouble.
They believe Santos left because he was undocumented, and Williams because he had a warrant for unpaid child support.
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