It is 5:42 p.m. on November 20, 2025, and the mountains around Big Stone Gap, Virginia, are already swallowing the last light of the day.

A Knoxville trucker named Dale is pulled over on Route 23, sipping gas-station coffee while his dashcam rolls in lazy 4K.

Then Travis Turner appears.

The beloved Union High head football coach, still in his maroon Bears hoodie, drives past in his black F-150 like a man late for the biggest game of his life. No wave. No brake lights. No hesitation.

At the 14-second mark, he suddenly yanks the wheel hard right, tires spitting gravel, and disappears into a wall of pine and rhododendron exactly 700 meters from the highway’s edge.

The trucker’s footage ends with nothing but darkness and the faint echo of an engine cutting off deep in the trees.

That 22-second clip, released by Virginia State Police yesterday, December 9, 2025, is now the most watched video in Appalachian history.

Because 19 days later, Travis Turner, 46, father of three, undefeated legend, and the man every kid in Wise County called “Coach T,” is still missing.

And the gun he carried into those woods has never been fired… or found.

What the dashcam didn’t capture is why.

At 3:45 p.m. that same afternoon, while Travis was still drawing up goal-line stands on a greaseboard, detectives from the Virginia State Police Bureau of Criminal Investigation were finalizing arrest warrants for ten felony counts: five for possession of child sexual abuse material and five for computer solicitation of a minor.

By 4:30 p.m., someone tipped him off.

He left practice early, told his assistants “family emergency,” kissed his wife Leslie goodbye with the words “I love you more than you’ll ever know,” and vanished into the mountains he grew up hunting.

Leslie found his blood-pressure meds, glasses, and wedding ring lined up on the kitchen counter like a suicide note without the note.

The only thing missing was his .38 revolver.

Since that night, 200 searchers, six cadaver dogs, three drones with thermal imaging, and two helicopters have combed 12 square miles of Jefferson National Forest.

They’ve found his truck, abandoned 1.2 miles in, driver’s door open, keys in the ignition, no blood, no struggle.

They’ve found nothing else.

Not a footprint. Not a shell casing. Not Travis Turner.

The dashcam has turned a missing-person case into a ghost story.

Dale, the trucker, still can’t sleep.

“I replay it every night,” he told local news, voice shaking. “He didn’t look scared. He looked… relieved. Like he’d made up his mind the second he turned the wheel.”

In Big Stone Gap, the town that lives and dies with Friday night lights, the footage is played on loop at the Dairy Queen, in barber shops, on church projectors during prayer vigils.

Some call him a monster who ran from justice. Some call him a man framed by a cruel hack and hunted into the hills. Most just call him Coach.

And every night at 5:42 p.m., someone new pulls over at that exact spot on Route 23, lays a single maroon pom-pom on the guardrail, and stares into the same wall of trees that swallowed him whole.

Because 700 meters is nothing on a map.

But in those Virginia woods, 700 meters is forever.

And somewhere in that forever, Travis Turner is still running.