One of them, I got a "biohazard" placard and one morning while they were sleeping in, stuck it on their door on the way out the door heading for work.

Fortunately they have been gone for more than 2 decades, but I still get PTSD from some things I encounter that reminds me of them.

That’s awful!

I suspect either they finally changed their ways, or just became a couple of entries in the grey columns of statistics of those who made a short lifetime of bad decisions.

Probably gone. I was trying to find a few people I knew who just disappeared from public view.

Of course for one of them, his mother isn't getting any younger, and we have not heard a peep about him since pre-Covid. It wouldn't surprise me if, when his mother passes away, we won't be able to track him down to even let him know. Although because she's on disability, there won't be any estate per se to pass along, It will probably require a private investigator just to find and notify him.

At this point he may not even want to be notified. It’s not normal for an adult child to want nothing at all to do with a parent unless there is a serious breach between them. If it comes to that, the police department will use their resources to locate next of kin.  It happened when someone a friend knows died unexpectedly without a will and the person of contact was the friend, not a relative. The friend was able to give them names and they used their resources to find the living relatives and inform them they may have an estate coming to them if they chose to pursue it.  I didn’t hear what happened as the police didn’t inform the friend of the outcome, but I assume the estranged relatives who the person did not want to leave anything to, were happy to claim the estate. It was substantial.

He was a "failure to launch" but they did communicate right up until a few weeks before her phone died and it was not possible to recover the contact list from it.

Well she doesn’t seem to miss him all that much.

But she does wonder how he's doing. Just has lost the contact information, and now I haven't seen the deceased phone for about 2 years. I was going to take it to a forensic expert who can extract data from even a bricked phone.

That’s a good idea,