By Suzanne Smalley
The Boston Globe
Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company
All Rights Reserved
BOSTON — Family members and colleagues of a missing sailor worried yesterday over his sudden disappearance from outside a bar near Faneuil Hall during Friday night’s snowstorm, fearing foul play.
Dustin Willis, 26, a petty officer on a Navy destroyer docked in South Boston, was separated from friends as he spoke on his cellphone to a girlfriend at about 10 p.m., Lieutenant Paul Brawley, a Navy spokesman, said yesterday.
“To our knowledge, he was not intoxicated,” he said. “We’re very concerned about his safe return.”
Police, who have asked for the public’s help, said yesterday that Willis’s girlfriend called his cellphone at 3 a.m. Saturday and a Spanish-speaking man answered. She told police that because of the language barrier she was only able to obtain a phone number, which turned out to be for the Legal Sea Foods restaurant located near where Willis was last seen, police spokeswoman Elaine Driscoll said.
Willis’s father, Tony Willis, said investigators told him they found his son’s phone at the restaurant. He said police also told him they will begin formal questioning today of the crew members his son was out with.
A manager at the restaurant, which is located at Long Wharf near Faneuil Hall, said she was not authorized to comment yesterday.
Brawley said that Willis’s earlier conversation with his girlfriend ended normally, but that his friends never saw him again. When Willis didn’t return to the ship Sunday morning at the end of his weekend leave, officers on Willis’s ship called police. The USS Donald Cook is set to leave Boston tomorrow morning for its home port in Norfolk, Va., Brawley said.
“He’s a good sailor and a responsible young man,” Brawley said in a telephone interview. “That’s why this is out of character.”
Barbara Jackson, Willis’s mother, said her son has a 4-year-old child at home and would never wander off without notifying family members.
“I’m worried something happened to him,” she said in a telephone interview from her home in North Carolina yesterday. “It would be out of his character to just walk off.”