For teenage boys,
video games are more than just an escape.
You're so going down.
They are where friendships are built,
Come on, come on.
...trust is earned, and bonds become unbreakable.
But when the line between
fantasy and reality starts to blur,
placing your trust in the wrong person
can have deadly consequences.
I remember, like, all the good times,
like I was just having a blast.
Looking at all of these is just like, it feels like
like a fairy tale,
like none of this happened.
But like
having all of it here, it's just reassuring that
these are memories that I'll have access to.
I've never really spoken publicly until now, of course.
It's crazy that, like, so long ago, this was us,
and now it's, like, 10 years later.
It's like these are memories that we can't
make again.
♪ Whoa ♪
♪ Hey, oh, hey, oh What do you say, oh ♪
♪ Light up It's a bonfire party, whoa ♪
♪ Light up It's a bonfire party ♪
Perry's a really small town.
Everybody knows everybody.
Everybody knows everybody's kids and everybody's parents,
so you can't do anything silently.
But I think it created a sense of community.
It was really safe in Perry.
We could go out and run through the woods.
We could skateboard,
you know, late at night, not have to worry about anything.
When I was eight, my mom and I moved out here from California,
and Sam was one of the first people I met.
My mom dated Sam's dad, Chris.
And Sam and his brother, Logan, were like
the first real friends that I had.
And we would just sit down and play video games.
And then we would all go out in the woods and stuff like that
and find like sticks. There was like sword fight.
I had met Sam in eighth grade.
I met Brayson actually at Sam's house.
If Sam brought somebody over, it was like, "OK, cool."
By the time we were in middle school,
video games would be like our escape
to like something fun.
We played video games quite a lot.
It took up a big part of our after school,
especially at night.
It was video games and movies and music.
My boyfriend at the time, Corrin, was in band drumline,
specifically with Logan and Sam.
With the group, things could get a little messy sometimes.
When the drama arose, Sam was out.
He left the room.
He's going to play video games. He is not...
He's not feeding into it.
There was a period of time where it was just me,
Sam, and Brayson hanging out every weekend,
even after we graduated high school
and started going into jobs and whatnot.
The dynamic never really changed.
The weekend of October 14th, that was the last weekend
of the Georgia National Fair.
Huge fair happens every year.
And that Sunday, Sam,
Logan, and Brayson and I were planning on going.
Sunday morning, I was really excited.
We went every year, Sam and I.
We would ride with his dad to the fair, do our normal stuff,
see the animals, ride some rides.
Two o'clock hits. Chris picks me up.
And he starts asking me, like, if I heard anything
from Sam or anything like that. I say, "No."
This is the last text message that I received from Sam.
We were texting each other
at, like, 1:00, 1 AM. on the 15th.
He said, "Is two good for you?"
"I'll be at work. I get off right at 2,
so I'll bring a bag of clothes so it should be OK."
He said, "All right, that's cool."
I said, "All right, man, I got to go to bed.
Good night, man." And he said, "Good night."
I knew I would see him on Sunday
or that was the plan.
I had stayed overnight in Atlanta
and then came back home noon or so on Sunday.
And Sam and I were gonna go grab lunch and then go get
Brayson and Logan, and then go to the fair.
When I got home, Sam wasn't there.
I called his mom, Nicole. I called Logan.
I called Zach. Nobody had seen him.
I called his cell phone.
I realized he didn't have it with him.
It was at the house, which wasn't unusual.
Unlike most teenagers, he wasn't attached
to the cell phone.
I remember him forgetting his phone quite often.
So I was hoping that he just, uh, just got lost
in track of time. I remember a few times
going over there. Sam wasn't there.
So it wasn't super out of the ordinary for that to happen.
I didn't think nothing of it.
I was thinking, "Yeah, well, maybe he was at the fair."
Brayson, Logan, and I had gone to the fair to look for Sam,
thinking maybe he'd gotten a ride there
and was there waiting for us.
I don't know why we thought
it was gonna be easy trying to find,
like, a specific person
within the sea of people at the state fair.
We got home from looking at the fair,
and Sam still wasn't there.
I was very concerned.
I got a text from Logan asking if I was with Sam,
and I wasn't, but I said, "Maybe he's with
our other friend. I'll give her a message."
Chris was calling everyone.
I called basically everybody I knew,
and then I found on his laptop a message...
...from his friend Dakota.
Right after I got off texting him the plan to go to the fair,
Dakota messaged him for help on his computer.
Sam would help anybody with anything at any time.
Even at 1:30.
So I'm thinking, "OK, well, Dakota knows where he is."
So I drove over to his house,
and Dakota said, after fixing the computer,
Sam had left,
and he hadn't seen him since.
So I've asked Dakota which way he left,
and Dakota said he went out the back through the woods
'cause it's a much shorter walk. But he also, he was barefoot,
which wasn't a big deal
'cause Sam didn't care for shoes much, so.
That, you know, that wasn't
concerning at the time.
Dakota and I actually walked that path
looking for Sam
and, you know, didn't find him.
Sam!
At that point, I had called the police...
...and reported Sam missing.
I messaged Logan again, and I was like, "Hey,
did you get a hold of Sam?"
And, uh, he didn't.
Everything happened so fast after that.
An 18-year-old who has been missing since Saturday,
Samuel Poss, was last seen leaving a friend's house
on Tucker Road in Perry.
There was a lot of press,
tents put up everywhere,
search groups, flyers,
Whole new ballgame.
Trying to figure out what's going on.
Where did he go? How far could he have gone?
I wanted answers.
2
- How's it going, man? - Not too bad.
- What's up, man? - What's up?
How you doing? It's been a minute.
Come on in. Come on in.
Thank you for inviting me over, man.
I really appreciate that.
Like, I was not expecting to hear from you.
Ten years, man.
Ten years since, like, the last time we've
actually, like, sat down, like, near each other,
or in, like, the same room and stuff.
Well, I know. I completely, like,
isolated myself. - Oh, yeah.
It just felt like everything stopped.
Kind of, like, walking around like a zombie.
The day that he went missing, I was actually supposed
to spend the night over there,
but I think I worked a double shift.
And I was like, "Now I'm just gonna go to sleep."
I feel like I should have just gone over there.
Sunday night, around 6:30, we received a call
of a missing person, an 18-year-old, Sam Poss,
from his father, Chris Poss.
Chris had spoken to his son Friday before leaving
to go out of town.
He spent the weekend with some friends,
and when he came back on Sunday, was unable to locate Sam.
So after Chris reported
Sam missing, detectives went out to the house...
...to see if there was any evidence or anything that just
stood out that could have told us where Sam was.
Unfortunately, we do have a lot of missing person cases
where teenagers run away, just don't wanna be home.
But speaking to Chris and Sam's mother,
they were both pretty adamant that Sam wasn't just
up and left
willingly.
Even though they were divorced, they were still
very involved in Sam's life. Sam had friends.
He got along with his friends, there wasn't any turmoil,
but you have to run down every trail.
This is the path that Sam would have taken
from Dakota's house to his house.
This way that we're walking now would take you to Sam's house.
Back this direction over here, that is where Dakota lived.
So Sam would have been coming from that direction
towards his house this way.
Dakota was a grade below us.
So I had met Dakota at school, and we started hanging out.
And then that's kind of how he had met Sam.
We did hang out quite a bit, all three of us.
And we would all play video games together.
Or we would all be hanging out with his brother's friends
and stuff like that too, kind of just as one big group.
We had heard Sam was with, uh,
Dakota and had come over and helped him
fix the computer,
which wouldn't be unusual for Sam to help someone
in the middle of the night.
And I think they live close enough to each other
that it wouldn't be a big issue.
I thought maybe Sam was with, you know, his girlfriend
he had been on-and-off with.
We spoke to Sam's ex-girlfriend.
Her and Sam had basically split up two weeks ago
and were no longer together.
She had some concerns that Sam was unhappy,
but nothing to the point that she thought he would run away.
Sunday night, I called as many people as I knew.
Dakota and I had spoken.
I was messaging people on Messenger.
I was sitting there just waiting.
The front door was open, just
just waiting for him to come back.
And I had the thought.
"I'm never gonna see him again."
But...
I couldn't dwell on that. I couldn't...
freak out because I'm his dad.
I have to protect him and I have to find him.
The next morning, we organized
a pretty large search for Sam.
We set a command post.
We brought out the special response team
that comes out, search and rescue.
I spoke to the media.
We're just doing everything we can to try not to leave
any stone unturned.
We had Georgia State Patrol's helicopter out.
We had four wheelers.
We had bloodhounds trying to find a scent.
A lot of Sam's friends showed up to help with the search.
Zach and Brayson and Dakota.
Dakota showed up, I think, with a guy I knew
from high school, Brandon. A lot of people were there.
It was weird searching for my friend in those woods
that we went in as kids, playing and having
a good old time.
A thousand possibilities running through my head.
But I remember, like, looking to my left,
and, like, three, four, five trees down,
I'd see another guy over there,
bandmates from the high-school band.
Even people that we haven't spoken to since, like,
middle school were there.
So it was like, I had faith with all these people,
we can do it. We can find him.
We had flyers.
So after we'd go through the woods for a few hours,
we'd go around town and put flyers up everywhere.
Me and Sam, we were in different grades in band class.
I was called Little Paws 'cause I reminded everyone
of Sam.
At school, I started hearing that Sam was missing.
Band was a really tight-knit group.
It brought a lot of people together.
The idea of Sam getting hurt or someone doing something
to him was definitely just shocking 'cause of how nice
he was to everyone.
While we were searching, we reached out to Sam's friends
to see if they knew anything.
And Zach seemed to be the most knowledgeable
about what was going on with Sam.
We wanted to ask Zach about Dakota.
Because Dakota's the last person that saw Sam alive,
and Zach was actually the connector
between Dakota and Sam.
Dakota and I were definitely close.
He came from a rough childhood,
and he had some behavioral issues.
And when he moved in at my house, actually a lot
of that stopped because we just stayed busy all the time.
Sam and Dakota didn't hang out a lot without me being there,
but it was not out of character
for Sam to help him with his computer.
And Sam definitely would walk through the woods
barefoot, though. That was something he would do.
But the big question the police came to ask me is, "Do you think
"Dakota would be capable of doing something like,
like, you know, harming Sam or anything of that nature?"
My immediate response was, "Well, no, I don't think
he would do something like that."
It sounded to me that Zach was a huge support to Dakota,
and that he would know if Dakota was trying
to hide something, and he didn't give us that indication.
It definitely did make me feel like maybe they thought
I had done something, but at the same time,
it was just like, you know, they're just looking for Sam,
and they're gonna ask anybody they can any questions.
On serious cases like this,
we kind of have a motto, we don't go home
until we have it solved.
We just kept a presence in that area the entire time.
What if Sam had been murdered?
What if somebody had done something with Sam
and he is in the woods?
What if that person comes back to get rid of evidence
they think they dropped
or to try to move a body that they had hidden?
Our thoughts were stay in the area, stay focused.
Who knows what may happen?
Somebody may show back up.
Oh, you got something?
And someone did.
Oh, hold on.
2 When 18-year-old Sam Poss goes missing,
the police take a long, hard look at all
his close friends,
especially those that appear most invested
in the ongoing search for him.
But after everyone heads home for the night...
Hey!
...a new, yet familiar face is found
lingering in the woods.
So back over this direction was where that old barn,
the structure that was falling apart,
that's where it was located.
It just wasn't a normal place that you would think
someone would be hanging out.
But that's where we found
Jonathan.
Don't run! Don't run!
Jonathan actually was a schoolmate of Sam's.
I was very surprised that Jonathan was a suspect.
He definitely was an odd kid.
We would see him walking, and whenever we would try
to approach him, he would just kind of run off.
It's very suspicious when in the middle of the night
you've got somebody walking around in the woods,
especially in a location that has had such a heavy
law enforcement presence...
all day.
So we talked to Jonathan.
His story was he just was interested, wanted to be
out there, wanted to be looking around.
We followed up on his whereabouts
when Sam disappeared.
We found no connection that Jonathan had anything to do
with the disappearance.
And it was just another letdown.
Tuesday morning, my stepdad and I loaded up and went back
out there to do more searching.
And then my stepdad mentioned something about, like, "Hey,
I don't think he's in these woods."
And that's when it dawned on me.
I was like, "Maybe he isn't here.
But where? Where could he be?"
Sam?
Me and Dakota were walking around town in the morning.
We were kind of just like going around town,
searching our common hangout spots for any idea
of clues or anything like that.
There was no way we were giving up on finding him.
One of the theories was that it was something to do
with the fair.
Everybody from all over the state, even out of state,
are coming to Georgia, so
it's a perfect breeding ground for something bad to happen.
There are rumors that he became a carny
and ran away with the fair.
Why would he join the fair? It didn't make sense.
But we were all just grasping at straws.
Everybody's kind of getting more anxious.
You kind of had to wonder, can we trust anybody else?
It definitely felt like you needed to look
over your shoulder.
You think twice about stepping outside,
and you think twice about who's following you too close.
I would say by Tuesday night, I was spiraling,
and Sam's brother, Logan was spiraling.
I'd never really been scared for anyone's life before.
Um,
and to have it be like a close friend was
terrifying.
The end of every day, when he still
wasn't home, was...
It was heartbreaking.
And Annabelle, his dog...
...kept looking for him.
And, you know, whenever somebody would come up
to the door, she'd, like, perk her ears up, like,
"Oh, he's home."
But it wasn't.
We were 100% sure when we left that night
that Sam was definitely
nowhere in these woods where Dakota had said
he last saw him.
I was disheartened,
but, you know, we had not given up hope that
Sam would be found alive.
My focus was to go back,
and Dakota was the first person we started focusing back on.
I think a lot of the blame was pointed at Dakota at the time,
for sure. Like, a lot of people were
speculating, "It was Dakota. It was Dakota."
My stepdad mentioned, like, "Do you think Dakota
could have done it?"
And I was like, "No."
I said, "No, it doesn't make sense.
There's no way."
I didn't trust Dakota.
I know his Facebook was kind of dark.
He had some cryptic posts about death in general.
I drove by Dakota's house at one point.
And I think they either had it blocked off
or he wasn't there anymore.
But I was ready to ask him questions.
I was definitely told to leave him alone.
But I was looking him up online.
I was trying to get any information I could on him,
because I wanted answers so bad,
I was willing to do anything to find them.
2
While Dakota was on our radar, we can't get tunnel vision
and end up missing the boat on something that's important.
We were reaching out to the public for information.
You know, this thing was hitting the media,
it was on the news, and they were covering it,
you know, every hour on the hour.
Police and family and friends were out looking for him
all day long.
Bloodhounds scoured the area where he was last seen.
There were tips and sightings.
One of the sightings, actually, that they found was
actually Brayson walking along the road.
Somebody had called into the police saying
they saw Dakota at the car wash
after Sam was missing.
Then I heard at some point this boy came forward to police
and said, "Hey,
"somebody on my bus basically confessed
to killing somebody."
We were checking every lead that was coming in.
A high-school student told us that his friend Brandon
asked him on the bus, "Would you still be my friend
if I told you I killed somebody?"
I had no idea who Brandon was.
Brandon, he went to high school with us.
He had been to my house a couple of times to hang out.
While that was on our radar, I get a call
that really changed
the direction of the investigation.
The caller said that they have information where Sam is.
The caller was Dakota's aunt.
On Wednesday night,
Dakota had gone to his mother
and basically told her what he did.
She tells his aunt, who makes the decision
to turn him in.
We got the information from the aunt that
Dakota killed Sam.
When we heard that,
we couldn't get to Dakota's house fast enough.
There's an 18-year-old that has lost their life.
And we had someone that we can hold accountable for that.
3:43 AM.
Police said, "We found him."
That's not good news.
I knew he wasn't gonna come back.
There was a feeling.
Something was missing in the world.
And it was Sam.
When I got the phone call
from my ex at three in the morning,
I knew what I was about to hear.
And all they said was, "Sam's gone."
At this point, I was exhausted.
Probably had, like, a few hours of sleep.
But I remember my mother handing me
the phone and crying. I remember everything
feeling fuzzy.
I felt like I was still dreaming.
We all met at Logan's house.
Some of Sam's friends were there, and just all
of us were there, just
huddled together.
Everybody was holding on to somebody,
and everybody was crying.
I remember hearing that
Dakota was in custody.
He's lucky he was,
'cause he shouldn't get away with it.
The arrest was the easy part, and now my job has just begun.
This interview is extremely important, and we're in there
for three, four hours talking back and forth.
And then he just looked at me and looked down and was like,
"Sam is not alive,
and I didn't kill him alone."
When I heard that there was a second person involved,
that was a shock.
The shocking revelation that Sam was killed by not one...
...but two of his buddies
leaves every one of his friends wondering...
Who else betrayed them?
2
All right man, I knew you were coming over,
so I got the console out and everything
so we can play some games.
Let's go.
Oh, appreciate it.
All right, so Sam would wreck me at this.
- Every game. - Every game, dude.
He was pretty good at whatever game he played.
Oh, yeah, for whatever reason,
he just had, like, a knack for it.
For a long time, I did have a guilty feeling
a little bit, 'cause I had met
Dakota separate from Sam, and then that's how they kind
of got introduced to each other, so...
There was a period of time where it was like,
"Well...
"if they had never met through me,
then it would have not ended up this way."
Well, I mean, that's a fairly thing to think of, but it's not
your fault at all, man. - Right, right.
Dakota being involved in that, I just, I don't know,
I just couldn't believe it.
Once I talked to Dakota, and we got a connection,
he felt comfortable telling me what he had done.
Brandon, he went to high school with us.
He was in the same grade as Dakota.
He had been to my house a couple times to hang out,
but I never really got good vibes off of him.
Brandon Warren, he was a quiet kid.
He didn't cause any problems, but he didn't seem like
an extremely happy-go-lucky person
like Sam was.
Brandon Warren was about the only other person that
Dakota was close with,
but I just don't understand how he could get to that point.
Wait, what?
Just because he wanted to know what it felt like?
Dakota confided in me that he, you know, there were times that
he thought about suicide.
That was a concern, for sure, that he may try
to harm himself at some point.
But I never would have imagined that he would kill anyone else.
He had called Sam.
Sam was gonna fix an alleged computer issue
that they made up.
They knew he'd come help.
So they used his kindness against him.
They went and picked Sam up at Sam's house,
bring him back to Dakota's house.
Brandon was driving the car.
Dakota was sitting in the back seat.
And as they're pulling in the driveway,
Dakota said that he put a wire around Sam's neck
and pulled back as hard as he could.
And Brandon took a knife
and was stabbing Sam in the abdomen area.
I spend way too much time
thinking about Sam's last moments
and what was going through his mind,
'cause evidently, according to Dakota,
Sam asked him why.
I don't think Dakota answered him, but...
The utter act of betrayal
is mind boggling.
It crumbled my world, my ideas of like friendship
and all that.
Couldn't trust anyone ever after that.
After Dakota had identified Brandon Warren,
we brought Brandon down to the police department
and he lawyered up immediately, and refused to speak to us.
I knew Brandon from middle school
and I would have never thought that they could have done this.
Finding out that Sam had been murdered was already just
shocking, and finding out, you know, it's two people
you went to school with personally,
it's just inconceivable.
OK.
Right in here is where we found him.
You think that's it?
When we pulled back the tarp and saw the, uh,
the cable wrapped around his neck,
there was no doubt that this was Sam Poss.
This is the first time that I've actually walked back
to the location. Brings back a lot of memories,
brings back a lot of thoughts for Sam's family.
I miss Sam so much,
that he's in basically everything I do.
And he
was such a good kid.
It was a good 18 years.
I think innocence was lost that day
for all of us.
And I think...
I think it will affect me for the rest of my life.
Dakota White and Brandon Warren were
both charged with malice murder.
They both went on trial separately.
And each of them blamed the other one
for the murder of Sam Poss.
It felt very unfair,
because Sam was like a brother to me.
I thought we would always be, like, together.
And now I had to go on with life without him.
Do you have any kids or anything like that?
- Yeah, yeah, I got two kids. - Sweet, man.
Yeah, so John is my oldest, and then I named Sam after Sam
with permission of his parents, of course.
Oh, nice.
Yeah, I have two boys of my own, too.
We gave Oliver Sam for his middle name.
We used it in honor of him and all that, so.
Heck yeah, man.
But, yeah, man, it's kind of wild having a little Sam
walking around. - Oh, yeah, it definitely is.
It definitely is.
I haven't really been able to, like,
talk to anybody about this, so I do appreciate, like,
having the outlet right now.
For sure. We should hang out more after this.
Oh, dude, 100%, man. Yeah.