A recent graduate of Cornell University sent an eerie email before she mysteriously disappeared in Los Angeles earlier this year.
Jahnay Bryan, 23, hasn’t been seen or heard from since Oct. 16—the same day her sister says her now-missing sibling reached out to her ex-boyfriend out of the blue and suggested they get hitched.
“I think we should get married, and I think we should work in industry,” that email said in part, according to her sister.
No one has been able to make contact with Bryan ever since, her sister Jahque Bryan-Gooden told NewsNation Thursday. The sister said that email came two months after Bryan had sent another blunt email to her ex: “Gone for the last few months, back moving to a new city Monday. Bye.”
That head-scratching correspondence apparently left Bryan’s loved ones perplexed, especially since the emails had grammatical errors—something one wouldn’t expect from a recent Ivy League grad. She was reported missing by her sister on Nov. 13, nearly a month after she supposedly sent the second email to her former beau.
Police in Los Angeles blasted out an “ebony alert” for the woman on Nov. 19 with details about the block she was last spotted at, but there’s been no police update since then. That info was pushed out in a press release that did not specify if Bryan may be a victim of foul play, which loved ones fear is a possibility. The LAPD did not immediately respond to a request for information from the Daily Beast.
“On October 16, 2024, around 9 a.m., Jahnay was last seen near the 2000 block of West 8th Street,” police wrote. “Jahnay has not been seen since and her family is concerned for her wellness.”
Bryan-Gooden said she’s frustrated with the lack of updates. She told NewsNation there has been at least nine potential sightings of her sister in Los Angeles, but she did not elaborate on where those reports were coming from.
“It is incredibly tiring and frustrating that no matter how much I know, it seems like it’s incredibly slow to move on getting any proof,” Bryan-Gooden said.
Bryan-Gooden said she’s confident her sister isn’t just going off the grid like Hannah Kobayashi—another high-profile missing persons case that gripped the nation this month—was recently discovered to have done this month.
Instead, Bryan-Gooden says her sister—who graduated from Cornell in 2023 and who once had her own podcast—was staying with someone in Los Angeles who “could put her life in danger.” The sister did not specify how she reached that conclusion beyond claiming she received a call that indicated her sister may be in a bad place.
“She had just graduated from Cornell and had all these ambitions, it is incredibly unlike her to just completely go off the grid,” Bryan-Gooden told NewsNation.
The worried sister told Dateline previously that “getting trafficked” or “someone kidnapping her” was among Bryan’s biggest fears. She added that the Pennsylvania native had been slowly cutting off family and friends since she moved back to her home state after college graduation to live with their mother, who Bryan-Gooden says hasn’t responded to requests for info or help.
It’s unclear when Bryan made her way to Los Angeles, but Bryan said earlier this month that her sister’s Outlook account showed that she was in the Pacific time zone. Bryan-Gooden said she hopes she can see her “natural leader” of a sister again soon and tell her she loves her.
“Not only was she loved, but she loved a lot of people, so—or does love people,” Bryan-Gooden said. “So, to know that—know that people that care for her the most, she hasn’t been in contact with, it’s scary. And it’s not like her, right? It’s abnormal behavior.”
