When Palm Beach Gardens police found Alan Jay Abrahamson lying face-up in an empty field near his golf course community on the morning of January 25, 2018, nothing about the scene made sense. He had a single bullet wound to the chest. No weapon. No shell casings. His cash and watch were missing. In a gated neighborhood where serious crime almost never happens, it looked like a textbook homicide.[1]

It wasn't.

Abrahamson, 71, lived in a $900,000 home in the BallenIsles Country Club community. Everyone who knew him called him the life of the party.[2]

Police offered a $3,000 reward. Nobody called. Weeks passed. Then investigators unlocked Abrahamson's phone and found something that shifted the entire case: an email confirmation, dated Christmas Day, for a weather balloon he'd ordered online. He'd also purchased two 40-cubic-foot helium tanks from separate suppliers.[3]

Detective Bryan Broehm proposed a theory that his own report acknowledged "seemed far-fetched": Abrahamson had tied a gun to a weather balloon with string, shot himself in the chest, and let the balloon carry the weapon skyward and out over the Atlantic Ocean. Gone. No gun, no suicide. Just what looked like an unsolvable murder.[1]

The physical evidence quietly confirmed it. A thin streak of blood on Abrahamson's sweatshirt ran upward from the wound toward his shoulder, as if something had been dragged through the blood after the shot. Rubber bands, knotted string, and a binder clip were found near the body. Unburned gunpowder on the fabric showed the shot came from extremely close range.[4]

But the most haunting evidence came from his phone. Voice-command searches, dating back to 2009, revealed that Abrahamson had been thinking about this for nearly a decade. "Do life insurance policies pay for suicide?" "Lifting capacity of a 3-foot balloon." "Shot in the heart. Do you die instantly?"[4]

"He was contemplating this, not for a week, not for a month," retired detective Rick Moretti told Oxygen's Accident, Suicide, or Murder. "He was contemplating this for 10 years."[4]

Surveillance footage showed Abrahamson leaving through the community gate at 5:53 a.m. carrying something in his left hand. The gunshot was recorded 37 minutes later. The night before, he'd driven to that same empty field and sat there for 55 minutes, rehearsing.[4]

When investigators researched whether anyone had ever attempted this before, they found exactly two precedents. The first was a 2003 episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, in which a character fakes his murder using helium balloons to carry the weapon away.[3] The second was a real case from 2008 in New Mexico. Thomas Hickman, 55, tried the same trick along a desert highway outside Santa Rosa. But Hickman used regular party balloons. They carried the revolver about 30 feet before tangling in a cholla cactus.[5]

Abrahamson, it seems, studied both. He upgraded to a professional-grade weather balloon and purchased enough helium to guarantee altitude. A balloon manufacturer told detectives that a 600-gram weather balloon launched from Alabama had traveled all the way to the Atlantic Ocean off New Jersey, some 18 hours later. Abrahamson's gun has never been found.[2]

After nearly six months of investigation, Palm Beach Gardens police released their findings in July 2018.[1] They concluded that Abrahamson, outwardly jovial and beloved, had been hiding a profound mental health struggle for years. He didn't want his family to know he'd taken his own life. "He wanted everybody to believe that he left happy," Assistant Chief Randall Anderson said. "He didn't want to reveal to his family and his wife that he was sad."[4]

That might be the most unsettling detail of all. Not the balloon, not the gun, not the elaborate scheme. The fact that a man could be in pain for a decade, surrounded by people who loved him, and none of them ever knew.

Sources

  1. Police say a man faked his own murder using a gun and a weather balloon — CNN
  2. Florida man stages suicide with 'CSI: Las Vegas' balloon scheme — Fox News
  3. Florida man faked his murder using a gun and a weather balloon — USA Today
  4. Alan Abrahamson Commits Suicide Using Weather Balloon — Oxygen
  5. Police say shooting death mimicked 'CSI' episode — Los Angeles Times

If you or someone you know is struggling, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7 by calling or texting 988.