A mother is distraught and friends distressed over a 37-year-old man who was last seen getting out of a taxi near his North Vancouver home around 3:30 a.m. on Thursday.
Leigh Luyt had been out with a friend in east Vancouver on Wednesday night and dropped his friend, Anthony Pavlokovic, off at his Kitsilano house between 10:30 and 11 p.m.
Luyt’s next-known whereabouts was between 3 and 3:30 a.m. when he was pulled over for excessive speeding on the Upper Levels Highway near Lonsdale Avenue in North Vancouver.
His car was impounded, but not before Luyt grabbed a red bag from inside and a taxi arrived to take Luyt home.
“We really don’t know anything,” Jill Luyt, Leigh’s mom, said Monday. “We’re wracking our brains. It’s not normal for him to be away for long and not be in touch with me. This morning I really fell apart but I’m lucky to have two amazing girlfriends with me and his friends’ support.
“That’s the only thing that keeps me going.”
Luyt’s extremely worried father is separated from his mother and lives in West Vancouver.
“He would never abandon his mom,” Pavlokovic said. “The two of them are thick as thieves. She needs him and he needs her.”
There has been no banking activity on any of Leigh’s known cards or accounts.
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Leigh Luyt has been missing since the early hours of Thursday. Anyone with information is asked to call the RCMP at 604-985-1311.
Luyt picked up Pavlokovic in Kits and the two headed to Strange Fellows, a brew pub on Clark Drive. They were there from about 9:30 to 10:30 p.m., then Leigh dropped off Pavlokovic back in Kits around 11 p.m.
He was not a heavy drinker, nor did Luyt do street drugs, Pavlokovic said.
“He was not impaired, he barely finishes a beer,” the friend said.
Luyt was known for taking long drives on impulse, his friends say, but not in the middle of the night like that.
“I find his driving old-mannish,” Pavlokovic said. “For him to be gunning it on a lonely road late on a Wednesday night, to be speeding at 3 a.m. …
“The big question is why he didn’t go home. He gets out of the cab a block from his house with the bag he grabbed from his car, then he disappears off the grid.”
The last thing Luyt said to Pavlokovic was that maybe they should get together for Halloween.
Luyt is bipolar and has his ups and downs, his friends say, and in hindsight they may have noticed him slowly slipping into a darker mood more often recently.
“I haven’t seen him in a couple of weeks,” said Ryan Stewart, who has know Leigh since kindergarten. “He came over and we watched a bunch of Zach Galifianakis’s ‘Between Two Ferns’ on You Tube, an hour-long session of watching and laughing.”
Luyt’s friends have distributed posters and have searched the brush and alleyways extensively around Norgate, from Capilano Mall to the Capilano River.
“It’s all we could think to do,” Stewart said.
Luyt is almost 5-foot-11, 195 pounds with black hair and brown eyes.
Anyone with any information is asked to contact the North Van RCMP at 604-985-1311.
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