Family and friends of the Missouri man who was imprisoned in Syria after he said he crossed into the country on a “pilgrimage” to Damascus hailed his unexpected recovery as a “Christmas miracle” on Thursday after about seven months with no contact.
“We’re very blessed that he is safe, that he is good, that he is protected,” Pixie Rogers said of her brother, Travis Timmerman. “And I saw on the news that he got fed.”
Timmerman, 29, who is from Urbana, Missouri, a small community north of Springfield, initially identified himself only as “Travis” in a video that emerged overnight that led some to misidentify him as missing American journalist Austin Tice, 43.
But Timmerman’s family said that he, too, had been missing, although they had no clue he was in Syria.
“I’m not sure what his thinking was in that,” Rogers said of her brother entering a country in conflict. “I wouldn’t think he’d do something like that.”
She said his family knew he was going to travel to Prague, the Czech capital, and then Hungary. His mother, Stacey Collins Gardiner, said he wanted to write during his trip and learn more about God and religion.
But after the occasional email and phone call, contact dried up and they worried his laptop and cellphone may have been stolen.
Only in recent weeks, Rogers said, after Missouri law enforcement was able to get in contact with U.S. Embassy officials in Hungary did the family learn Timmerman was in Lebanon.
Don Kelderhouse, the pastor of Preston Bible Baptist Church, in Preston, Missouri, where Timmerman attends services, said he knew of his plans to travel to Eastern Europe, but not the Middle East.
“We thought it might be a month or two that he’d be gone,” Kelderhouse said, adding, “We thought the money would run out and he’d go home. We didn’t know if he was dead or alive.”
Authorities in Missouri and Budapest, the Hungarian capital, put out a missing persons report for a man named Pete Timmerman, with Hungarian police identifying him as “Travis” Pete Timmerman.
The Missouri State Highway Patrol said in a public awareness bulletin that Timmerman had gone missing from Budapest on May 28.
Timmerman told reporters that he was stopped by Syrian officials earlier this year after crossing into the country on foot.
“I was on a pilgrimage to Damascus,” he told NBC News in a building on the outskirts of the capital. He said he had spent three days living in a mountain area around the border between Lebanon and Syria “without food and water” before he was spotted by a border guard and detained.
Timmerman said he was imprisoned by the regime for months during which “I was fed well, I always had water, the only difficulty was not being able to go to the bathroom” regularly.
He was then released by rebel forces as they broke into prisons across the country to free detainees.
Timmerman said he spent the past few days wandering the streets barefoot, sleeping outside and in an abandoned house. He was then found once again by a local resident he had asked for water, subsequently appearing in the video that quickly spread across social media and drew the news media’s attention.
After being located by NBC News and other outlets in Dhiyabia, Timmerman said he had “been reading the scripture a lot” before deciding to cross the mountains from Lebanon into Syria.
Kelderhouse said that Timmerman became baptized in the church about a year and half ago and had been eager to share his faith. He said he also has a law degree and had been writing, and the idea of him traveling across Eastern Europe to share his beliefs and learn more about the world didn’t strike him as odd. But the risk he took by going to Syria was surprising, he added.
“God must have a plan for his life,” Kelderhouse said. “He kept him alive.”
Kayle Owens, a classmate of Timmerman’s at Skyline High School in Urbana, a town of about 400 people, said he had played football and made “many lifelong friendships at our school.”
When friends learned he was missing, they prayed.
“It truly is a Christmas miracle,” Owens said. “We’ve been praying tirelessly for his safe return, and those prayers have been answered.”
