Rico Harris

On October 22, the sheriff's office announced it was scaling back the search. Divers were called in to search the nearby sections of the creek in mid-November, but found nothing. The investigation is continuing. In 2016 the Investigation Discovery channel series Disappeared devoted a segment to the case.

By October 2014, Harris had relocated to Seattle with a longtime girlfriend and had applied for a job there. He never arrived there from a trip from his mother's home in Alhambra to complete the move; he was last heard from when he left a message for his girlfriend. The call was traced to the Sacramento area, and his abandoned car was found in a Yolo County park several days later. There were some possible sightings up to a week afterwards, but none have been confirmed beyond a cell phone video the night of his disappearance, and extensive searches since have failed to find any trace of him in the area. His disappearance has been featured on an episode of the Investigation Discovery series Disappeared.

Instead, Harris returned to California and enrolled in Los Angeles City College (LACC), a two-year junior college, in the hope of improving his grades and playing for Harrick at Rhode Island. On the court, Cubs' coach Mike Miller let Harris play the game his way—shooting three-pointers, leading the Fast Break with no-look passes and faking out other big men under the basket as it suited him. "He could do it all," a teammate recalled in 2014. "He was Lamar Odom before Lamar Odom."

Harris ultimately returned to LACC for his second season, which he would later say was a mistake. He became less focused, partying heavily with his brother in the apartment they shared near campus, and drinking beer during the day to take the edge off his hangovers. It did not affect his game, however. A teammate recalls Harris showing up for a game once wearing heavy sunglasses to mask the effects of the alcohol. "He probably didn't get no sleep and [was] up all night—then dropped like 35 [points] that game".

By September 2014 they had begun to talk about getting married, even going so far as to discuss possible names for children. Harris and Mayorga clashed over the relationship; their friendship ended when Harris abruptly moved out of the apartment and left Mayorga with all the unpaid bills. Shortly afterwards, Harris moved in with Song in Seattle, intending to relocate there permanently.

LACC posted a 30–6 record that season. It culminated in the school's first-ever California Community College Athletic Association state title, secured with an upset win over San Jose City College. Harris was named the championship tournament's most valuable player.

 – Dean Nyland, Yolo County sheriff's detective

The program took a long time for Harris to complete, but when he did he seemed to have recovered. He moved in with Wilfredo Mayorga, another graduate of the program, and got a job working security detail in nearby Bell. At a party he met Jennifer Song, a visitor from Seattle who worked as an insurance broker. The two soon became romantically involved, and starting in 2012 they began spending long weekends in the other's city.

Efforts to persuade Harris to end his self-destructive path failed. Only in 2007, shortly after he turned 30, did he finally start to change. After an overdose of prescription medicine he had tried, Harris entered a rehabilitation facility operated by the Salvation Army in downtown Los Angeles.

Harris ended his season at Northridge after being suspended twice for violations of team rules. He eventually made his way to the Globetrotters, but injuries from a 2000 assault forced him to quit after one month. After leaving basketball, the alcoholism that had begun to manifest itself during his college career intensified, and Harris became addicted to illegal drugs as well. He was arrested many times before he was able to recover from his addictions in 2007.

In spring 2000, Harris opted instead to join the Harlem Globetrotters. His skills were ideal for the Globetrotters' shows, and he seemed to have found his niche. However, a month after he joined the team he was out driving with a girlfriend in South Los Angeles when he got into a dispute with some people there. After he left the car to confront them, someone hit him on the back of the head with a baseball bat.

"He would sniff Ajax just to feel the burn", a friend, David Lara, recalled. Throughout the 2000s Harris remained unable to overcome his addictions. He was arrested over a hundred times, most commonly for public intoxication. After a few days in jail, he often resumed drinking. To support his habits he would sometimes beg in the street. "It was despair, bro. It was down there. It was the darkest of the dark," says Lara of the sight.

Harris's drinking increased as the season wore on, leading to social isolation and costing him his relationship with the girlfriend who he had benefited from in high school. Recruiters from other four-year college programs continued to call and write, but Harris did not respond, believing many of them to be interested in him only for his athletic ability and not his personal development. Instead he declared himself for the 1998 NBA draft.

The opportunity to play for Harrick at Rhode Island was still available to Harris, and many friends and observers believed he would take it. In September 1998, he called Bobby Braswell, then the head coach at Cal State Northridge, whom Harris had come to know three years earlier when Braswell had recruited him while an assistant at Oregon. Braswell later recalled that he thought Harris was calling for guidance.

For most of his teens and 20s, Harris was praised for his NBA-level potential. The pinnacle of his playing career, however, would be the 1996–97 season, when he was the MVP of the state community college tournament and led his team to the state championship. He only played one season for a Division I team, however, and despite considerable interest from NBA teams never came close to signing with them.

Harris went to Arizona State under Proposition 48, which limited him to taking classes during his freshman year in order to regain his eligibility. Without his family and friends close by, he struggled academically and socially, as he originally had at Temple City. In March 1996 he was arrested on a charge of unlawful imprisonment along with two teammates after two women said the players had forced them to perform sex acts against their will. The charges were dropped after investigators uncovered inconsistencies in the women's stories, but the university asked Harris to sit out another year nonetheless.

A few weeks after that triumph, early in 1996, Harris signed his letter of intent to attend Rhode Island and play for Harrick there. However, he stopped attending a psychology class he needed to pass midway through the semester, and failed it as a result, leaving him still ineligible under National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) rules to transfer to a four-year college and play there. At the time there was speculation that he had deliberately failed the class to avoid having to relocate to the East Coast, far away from his hometown.

Off the court, Rico was initially shy and a poor student. However, after meeting a girlfriend whose academically inclined family helped him with his studying, he improved both socially and academically, achieving a 3.0 grade point average. On the court at that time, he became an even more dominant player, averaging 28 points and 15 rebounds a game during his senior season. The Long Beach Press-Telegram recognized him as one of the best high school players in the Western United States during the 1994–95 season, along with Chauncey Billups, Paul Pierce and Jason Terry, all of whom went on to long careers in the NBA.

Rico, then 6 feet 8 inches (203 cm) and 215 pounds (98 kg), was an immediate sensation on the basketball court. His presence on the team transformed the previously undistinguished Temple City program into a contender, and drew college scouts. "Other teams would double- and triple-team him," recalled one of his coaches. "But you could just watch him for a couple plays and you could see the player he could be." Harris had been a fan of the 1980s Los Angeles Lakers teams, and in particular emulated Magic Johnson's style of play.

Rico Omarr Harris (born May 19, 1977; disappeared October 10, 2014) is an American former professional basketball player. A high school standout in his native Southern California, he later led Los Angeles City College (LACC) to its first state junior college title in 1997. After his college career, he played for some International Basketball League teams, and later with the Harlem Globetrotters.

Harris was the first son born to Henry Harris, a former star forward for Idaho State who, after his college years in the mid-1970s, was playing in a semiprofessional league in Los Angeles when he met Margaret Fernandez, then 17. She gave birth to Rico, the first of the couple's four children, in 1977. Afterwards they moved to Oregon, where Henry had been offered a job.