“He Looks Like He Hasn’t Slept in Weeks”: Bailey Turner, Son of Fugitive Coach Travis Turner, Spotted for First Time – And Runs From Every Question About His Dad

By Caleb Moore, Coalfield Chronicle

BIG STONE GAP, Va. — The first time anyone had laid eyes on Bailey Turner in public since his father vanished into the mountains, he looked like a man carrying the weight of an entire county on his shoulders.

It was Friday night, December 6, 2025, in the bitter cold of Bears’ Den Stadium. Union High School was playing in the Class 2 state semifinals against Glenvar — the deepest playoff run in school history — and the stands were packed with people who still couldn’t decide whether to cheer or cry.

Then, just before kickoff, Bailey appeared on the sideline.

The 25-year-old assistant coach, defensive backs guru, and eldest son of missing head coach Travis Turner hadn’t been seen since the night his father walked into the woods with a gun and never came back. Rumors had swirled: he’d quit coaching, he’d moved away, he was helping his dad hide, he was suicidal himself. None of it was true. He was simply… gone.

Until now.

He stepped out of the tunnel wearing the same orange Union hoodie that used to fit him perfectly. Tonight it hung off his frame like it belonged to someone else. His beard was patchy and unkempt, his cheekbones sharper than anyone remembered, and the dark half-moons under his eyes looked permanent. One parent in the bleachers whispered to another, “That boy looks like he hasn’t slept in three weeks.” She wasn’t wrong.

Bailey kept his head down, clipboard clutched to his chest like a shield. He barked a few instructions to the secondary, slapped a couple of helmets, and tried to disappear into the routine of the game. But everyone could feel it — the stadium wasn’t just watching football anymore. They were watching a son trying to hold together the last pieces of the world his father built.

Union fought like hell. Down one point with seconds left, interim coach Jay Edwards called for the two-point conversion to win it instead of kicking for overtime. The pass fell incomplete. Final score: Glenvar 21, Union 20. Season over. Dream dead.

As the players dropped to their knees in the end zone, tears mixing with sweat, the media descended — not on Edwards, but on Bailey.

Microphones and cell phones shot toward him like spears.

“Bailey! How proud would your dad have been tonight?”

“Any message for your dad if he’s watching?”

“Have you heard from him at all?”

He froze for half a second — long enough for the cameras to catch the flash of pain across his face — then shook his head almost imperceptibly.

“No comment,” he said, voice flat and hoarse.

He tried to walk past. A local TV reporter stepped in front of him.

“Bailey, people just want to know — is your family okay?”

He stopped. For a moment it looked like he might break. His lips parted, eyes glassy. Then he swallowed hard, lowered his gaze to the turf, and pushed gently past.

“Please,” he muttered, so low only the closest reporter heard it. “Not tonight.”

And just like that, he was gone — slipping through the chain-link gate toward the parking lot, shoulders hunched against the wind and the questions.

Back in the stands, an older man who’d watched Travis coach Travis since the 1990s wiped his eyes with a sleeve. “That boy’s carrying more than any 25-year-old should have to,” he said. “God help him.”

No one has heard Bailey speak publicly about his father since November 20 — the night Travis Turner, facing ten felony charges involving child pornography and solicitation of minors, walked out the back door of his Appalachia home and into the wilderness.

The family’s attorney, Adrian Collins, has done all the talking: “They are cooperating fully… they want Travis found safe… they are heartbroken.” Leslie Turner, Travis’s wife of 24 years, has stayed almost entirely out of sight. Eleven-year-old Brynlee hasn’t been back to school since Thanksgiving break. Twenty-one-year-old Grayden deleted all his social media.

Bailey is the only one who kept showing up — silently — to coach the team his father left behind.

Tonight, even that felt too heavy.

As the stadium lights clicked off one by one and the crowd shuffled toward their trucks, a group of seniors lingered on the track.

One of them, a cornerback Bailey had personally mentored for four years, stared at the empty sideline where his assistant coach had just vanished again.

“He didn’t have to come tonight,” the player said quietly. “But he did. For us.”

Then he added, almost to himself: “I just wish somebody was there for him.”

In the mountains of southwest Virginia, winter is closing in. The search for Travis Turner continues — drones, dogs, deputies on horseback — but the trails are cold and the tips have dried up.

And somewhere out there, a son who once worshipped his father is trying to figure out how to keep breathing in a town that can’t decide whether to pray for the man or curse him.

Bailey Turner gave no answers tonight.

He barely even gave a smile.

But he showed up.

In a place of words, he offered the only thing he had left: presence on a sideline that will never feel the same again.