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didn’t respond to Bill’s requests for search assistance.
    “I knew by then if he wasn’t somewhere alive, he was in the river. It was a recovery situation,” he says.
    Search dogs were brought into the area. Authorities dragged the river but couldn’t search it without a special type of sonar. Bill found a team with that sonar capability. After several days exploring the area, all the team located were a few abandoned, submerged cars and a lot of trash.
    Witnesses—about fifty of them—gave statements that Matt was tossed out on the street in the dead of winter without his coat or anything to keep him warm. More than one hundred volunteers completed a grid search, covering every square inch of ground they could in the two weeks following Matt’s disappearance. Still, they could not find Matt.
    The Kruzikis checked Matt’s cell phone records and found 988 phone calls within a six-week period.
    “It was then we realized just how many people he knew, how many friends he really had,” Bill says.
    Witnesses vanished, running rather than talking to investigators. A $25,000 reward was posted. The family and their friends put out the word everywhere they could. They contacted John Walsh’s show, America’s Most Wanted . Despite their efforts, nothing happened for a frustrating three months. The case went cold at the beginning of March.
    Then, on March 18, the wait was over as abruptly as it began. Matt’s body was found five miles downriver, spotted by an airplane flying over a spot with the ironic name of “Dead Man’s Slough.” Search-and-rescue teams had to break the ice to pull him out.
    Bill and the rest of his family had to take what little comfort they could in the fact that they had Matt’s body—they could at least put him to rest. But what they couldn’t put to rest was what had happened to this bright, energetic, and popular kid, someone who was starting what would have been a good and productive life.
    Matt’s blood alcohol level of .11 (most states consider .08 too drunk to drive) revealed that he had indeed been intoxicated at the time he was thrown out onto the streets of East Dubuque to fend for himself. But his alcohol level, while indicating he was legally intoxicated, wasn’t that alarming in a healthy young male who had been drinking all evening.
    Matt’s death is still an open investigation and that, says Bill, is a “double-edged sword,” because as long as the case remains unresolved—neither a homicide nor an accident—the case file is closed to Bill. The police department is steadfast in its refusal to share any of the reports with the Kruzikis. Unless the case is inactivated, Bill will never know what, if anything, the police unearthed in their investigation.
    R
    Gone was the boy who knew everything there was to know about sports. Matt could rattle off statistics about football players and games with the same ease as he could summon batting averages for baseball players. His father characterized Matt’s mind as a “steel trap” and says his second love was music.
    “He played guitar and sang, though [he didn’t sing] very well,” Bill remembers.
    Chris, who was close to his brother, shared Matt’s enthusiasm for sports. A high school wrestler, Chris also started college but did not graduate. He saw his friends move on with their lives while he tried to find his own path to adulthood. Matt’s death hit Chris hard; he got a job in the mortgage industry that he liked and at which he excelled, but that was doomed when the industry collapsed. His job was downsized, and Chris was left with too much time to contemplate the loss of his brother and where he was in life.
    Both boys had good social lives—the usual girlfriends, buddies, and coworkers. But the most telling relationship they had was with one another. Two years apart, Matt had long been Chris’s shadow, as well as an individual in his own right. When people thought about Matt, their first thought was how kind and