As a small child growing up in Pennsylvania and California, Kelly Minarcin had noticed the face of a young boy staring back at him from a photo inside his family home.
The boy had dark hair just like his own. He couldn’t have been more than 10 years old.
‘He looked like me… if you put my picture as a kid next to him, we looked pretty similar,’ Minarcin tells DailyMail.com.
It wasn’t until he was around seven or eight years old that he found out who the little boy in the picture was and learned his tragic fate, one that would tear his family apart.
‘I’m one of five brothers…’ Minarcin says in his first media interview.
‘I’m the youngest – and the only survivor.’
January 14, 1982, was a bitterly cold winter night in the small town of Tarentum, Pennsylvania.
Snow covered the tightknit community and the Allegheny River running alongside the town was partly frozen over.
Two best friends Gabe Minarcin, 10, (left) and Jon Dabkowski, 11, (right) vanished without a trace on a cold night in 1982
Map shows where the two boys lived just a few houses apart close to the banks of the river
It was on this chilly night that two best friends Jon Dabkowski, 11, and Gabe Minarcin, 10, would vanish without a trace – never to be seen or heard from again.
The two boys lived just a few houses apart close to the banks of the river.
That night, they were last seen leaving Jon’s house together to make the roughly minute-long journey to Gabe’s home.
They never made it.
‘I remember my dad saying something about going to the store to get some fish sandwiches and when he got back his son didn’t come home,’ Minarcin says.
Panicked, the boys’ families reported them missing and a desperate search got under way in the blistering cold weather to try to find them.
Fears quickly grew that the boys had fallen through the ice of the frozen Allegheny River.
Police said a witness had seen children on the icy river and tracks were found going out onto the ice.
Fears grew that the boys had fallen through the ice of the frozen Allegheny River (pictured)
But, police said the tracks also appeared to return, as though whoever had gone out on the ice had made it back safely to solid ground.
Dive teams searched the river but found no trace of Jon and Gabe.
The other theory was equally terrifying: that the boys may have been abducted.
Minarcin says his family has never known what to think.
‘My mom said they could have got kidnapped, or they could have drowned in the river,’ he says.
‘It’s crazy… my mom and dad just don’t know. They don’t know what happened.’
At that time, it was the height of the Milk Carton campaign where missing children were thrust into the national spotlight on the sides of drink cartons and shopping bags.
And so Jon and Gabe’s faces sat on breakfast tables all across America.
But, despite the desperate efforts to bring them home, the days quickly passed with no sightings of Gabe or Jon.
Minarcin was born in 1985, three years after the two best friends vanished.
When he was four, he moved with his parents and older brothers Patrick and Ian to northern California.
Growing up away from Tarentum, for years Minarcin never knew he even had another brother. In reality, he had had two.
His parents Larry and Margaret had five boys: Gabe, Ian, Michael, Patrick and then Kelly.
Kelly Minarcin is speaking out for the first time about his brother’s unsolved missing persons case
Michael tragically died as an infant. Minarcin says Michael, Gabe and Gabe’s disappearance were never spoken about at home.
When he was around seven or eight, he began to learn about his late brothers Gabe and Michael.
‘As a kid, you just don’t really think about things too much,’ he says.
‘Then later on, when I got older, I started thinking about it… when I was in high school, it was a hard thing… I started getting depressed.’
He recalls one bizarre moment as a teenager when who he believes was an investigator turned up at his family home looking for Gabe.
‘It was weird… they thought Gabe lived there. And my dad’s like ‘I haven’t seen Gabe since he disappeared. I don’t know what you guys are talking about,’ Minarcin says.
Minarcin can only speculate that an online rumor or a tip may have led to the encounter that ‘freaked out’ his dad.
The two boys lived just a few houses apart close to the banks of the river in the tightknit town of Tarentum
Looking back now as an adult, Minarcin recalls his parents being ‘very protective’ of him and his siblings.
‘They didn’t let me go out places a lot. I’d always pretty much stay home, or I’d go out with friends that my mom and dad really trusted,’ he says.
‘They always wanted me to call once I got somewhere… I always remember my mom and dad saying ‘call when you get there.’ And that was until I was like 18, it was crazy.’
Gabe’s disappearance took its toll on his family in even more tragic ways.
Ian was just one year younger than Gabe and the two had been very close.
‘When I was more of an adult, I realized how sad my brother Ian was,’ Minarcin says.
‘He was only a year younger than him when it happened, so it probably affected him a lot harder.’
He says: ‘I never really talked to him about it… Ian didn’t talk about it. I never heard him talk about it once.’
Ian had struggled with alcoholism for years. He was trying to quit drinking and started having seizures.
At that time, it was the height of the Milk Carton campaign where missing children were thrust into the national spotlight on the sides of drink cartons and shopping bags
It was July 4 weekend in 2003 and Ian was swimming in a river, when he suffered a seizure and drowned. He was 30.
But the heartbreak still wasn’t over for the Minarcin family.
Around 13 years later, Patrick, who had cerebral palsy, passed away in 2016 aged 36.
Following Patrick’s death, Minarcin says he could no longer cry. ‘I couldn’t anymore… I cried too much before, and then I thought I could never cry again,’ he says.
The youngest of five brothers, Minarcin found himself now the sole survivor.
He reveals he ‘tried to drink my sorrows away’ after losing all of his siblings. Now, he is nine years sober.
All these years on, Minarcin is still waiting for answers as to what happened to Gabe and his friend Jon.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children later released age-progression pictures of the two boys. Left Gabe and right Jon
In 43 years, there have been next to no leads and Tarentum investigators continue to be stumped by the missing persons case.
There did appear to be a break in the case in 1998 when investigators thought they had found Jon.
It turned out to be a false start – another man had actually stolen the missing 11-year-old’s identity.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children released age-progression pictures of the two boys in the hope that, if they are out there somewhere, someone will recognize them.
In recent years, Minarcin has submitted his DNA profile to a genetic genealogy website and often wonders if his long-lost brother will pop up one day as a match.
‘Who knows, maybe he might be on there,’ he says.
While he says getting answers would help his family, Minarcin also doesn’t want to reopen old ‘painful’ wounds for his elderly parents who just ‘want to let it be’.
Kelly Minarcin is now living happily in northern California with his partner of four years Sarah
‘It’s been over 40 years now… They don’t want to go through the past again,’ he says.
He adds: ‘Some cases are just unsolved, and I just have to take it like that. I can’t be looking at it every day. I can’t be thinking about it. It’ll bring me down. I don’t want to go down the rabbit hole.’
Tragically, Minarcin has come to the conclusion that his brother is most likely no longer alive.
‘I just feel that he is gone and he’s in heaven somewhere,’ he says.
Now, as the only surviving brother in a tragic family tale, he is ‘just trying to live my life day by day’ and lives happily in northern California with his partner of four years Sarah.
‘I try not to think about the past. I mean in the back of my head I know – my four brothers are gone… but as long as I don’t think about the past, and try to look to the future and be in the present, I’m pretty happy.’
