In the early hours of the morning, precisely at 3:19 AM nearly a year ago, a CCTV camera captured the image of 22-year-old Liam Gabriel Toman, a striking young man, as he strolled through a ski resort in Quebec. With his phone in hand, he seemed at ease, making his way back to his hotel after spending the evening with friends.

Shortly thereafter, the electrical engineering graduate from Ontario inexplicably disappeared, leaving behind only chilling surveillance footage and his wallet, which was later discovered in thawing snow.

As the anniversary of this unsettling event looms, Liam’s parents remain trapped in a nightmare that feels unending. They firmly believe that their son’s fate was not a mere accident of wandering off and succumbing to the cold, but rather the result of a more sinister occurrence.

“We’re living in a state of perpetual trauma,” Liam’s mother, Kathleen, confided in an exclusive interview with the Daily Mail. “You don’t adapt to it; you take it one hour at a time.”

She acknowledges the ongoing struggle to come to terms with the situation, saying, “I still can’t wrap my mind around the fact that Liam is missing. It feels unreal.”

The family, she added, is now in therapy.

Liam’s father Chris, who spends a few minutes every morning in Liam’s bedroom, says they are suffering ‘ambiguous grief’ because they do not have closure. 

‘We don’t know what happened,’ he says. ‘We don’t think it’s a positive outcome.’

Liam disappeared in the early morning hours of February 2, 2025 during what was supposed to be a four-night ski trip with friends at the Tremblant resort in Quebec. 

Seven weeks later, a chilling discovery deepened the mystery: his wallet was found in the melting snow, still containing his driver’s license, debit card, and hotel access card inside.

Several intensive searches of the resort and surrounding rugged terrain last year failed to locate him.

The Toman family is convinced Liam was the victim of a criminal act.

‘Somebody else was involved,’ says Chris. ‘It could be an accident, it could be something that escalated. Liam is not where he wants to be. 

‘We don’t know if someone set him up or there was a robbery that went a little sideways.’

‘We feel in our hearts that there’s somebody else involved.’

Sgt. Catherine Bernard of the Sûreté du Québec (SQ) – Quebec’s provincial police force – told the Daily Mail that investigators have not concluded that foul play was involved. The family flatly rejects that assessment. 

‘All hypotheses are being explored,’ she said, adding that the police force continues to seek information from the public.

The family rejects any suggestion that Liam chose to disappear. His bank accounts and social media have not been accessed and his phone hasn’t come on.

His parents say they’re not aware of Liam having any mental health issues or secrets that could have made him vulnerable.

‘He wasn’t depressed. He was in a great state of mind,’ says Chris.

The city of Mont-Tremblant is located in the Laurentian Mountains region of the predominantly French-speaking province of Quebec and is about 85 miles north of Montreal and 95 miles northeast of Canada’s capital, Ottawa.

Mont-Tremblant attracts more than 2.5 million visitors every year. Most come during the winter months to ski on its 2,871-foot mountain.

The landscape is dotted with multi-million-dollar homes built for Canadian hockey stars, corporate executives and celebrities (Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones owned a Mont-Tremblant retreat from 2005 to 2018.)

The main draw is Tremblant, an American-owned ski resort and its pedestrian village filled with hotels, shops, bars and restaurants.

Walking around Tremblant, it’s impossible not to see Liam’s face everywhere: There are flyers in the windows of many of the businesses and posters all over the village.

‘A lot of people ask about it,’ said Stéphane Proulx, who works in the village. ‘They want to know what happened but there’s really nothing to tell them because no one knows.’

What is known is that on January 31, 2025, a Friday, Liam and his friends Colin Lemmings and Kyle Warnock drove five-and-a-half-hours from Whitby, east of Toronto, to Tremblant and checked in at the Tour des Voyageurs II hotel at the base of the resort.

The next day, they went skiing and snapped photos of the views from atop the mountain.

Later, Liam and his pals went for pizza and then a few drinks. At around 11.30 pm, Colin went back to the hotel to sleep while Liam and Kyle kept the party going at Le P’tit Caribou, a popular après-ski spot.

Liam and Kyle eventually lost each other in the crowd and, after getting no response to his text messages to Liam, Kyle decided to call it a night.

When Kyle and Colin woke the next morning, Liam wasn’t in the room. Unable to reach him, they assumed he had met someone.

Liam’s friends spent the day skiing but never stopped trying to get in contact with him. 

When they returned to an empty hotel room around 4pm, they became concerned. 

At around 6pm, they contacted Liam’s stepbrother Ryan, who called Chris and his wife Lara to let them know his son had been missing for 13 hours.

Kathleen remembers feeling ‘complete shock’ when Chris shared the news.

‘As soon as I saw it was a phone call and not a text, I knew,’ she recalls. ‘My stomach dropped. Something’s wrong. I knew immediately something was horrifically wrong.’

Kathleen says it was unusual that Liam had not texted her all day. ‘We just thought he was on the ski hill,’ she explains. 

‘The day before he was texting on the slopes, he was sending pictures. He was texting me that night at 11 at the bar. We were joking about the cold and getting new skiwear.’

Colin and Kyle contacted the SQ and filed a missing persons report. Chris, Lara, and Kathleen set out in a snowstorm to drive to Mont-Tremblant.

‘The car ride was really, really quiet,’ Lara says, ‘and very emotional.’

Immediately upon arriving at Tremblant, at about 4am on February 3, Liam’s mother and stepmother shared the same thought. 

‘Kathleen and I looked at each other and we said, ‘he’s not here. We know him.’ That sits in my mind still,’ Lara says. ‘He’s not in the snow. He’s not here.’

Kathleen adds: ‘We just couldn’t fathom it. We were numb. We were completely numb with shock.’

Chris can’t help wonder what might have been different if Liam’s disappearance had been reported hours earlier.

‘The police had said that had they known sooner … they may have had a better chance of locating him via his phone,’ he says. 

‘It’s hard. I wish a lot of things could have changed that night. Anything that would have helped track him.’

Kyle did not respond to an interview request and Colin could not be reached.

The SQ launched an extensive ground search that involved 100 officers, resort security staff and volunteers from a search-and-rescue organization on foot, snowmobiles, ATVs and horseback. 

Divers probed a nearby lake and swamp and a helicopter flew over the terrain using infrared scanners.

A more focused ground and air search was conducted in March after Liam’s wallet was found. Additional searches took place in April and early November.

All that investigators have shared publicly is a timeline of Liam’s last known movements.

He stayed at Le P’tit Caribou until sometime after 3am. 

Security camera footage shows Liam finishing a beer and playfully grabbing an empty glass off the bar. A bouncer grabs him by the back of his neck and escorts him out.

Security footage from several businesses show Liam walking alone at 3.17am, phone pressed to his ear as he called Kyle, who was asleep back at the hotel. Moments later, he pockets the phone and continues walking steadily toward his room. 

According to Environment Canada, it was nearly -30C (-22F) in Mont-Tremblant at the time.

‘We can see he’s walking with purpose,’ says Chris. Kathleen notes that Liam ‘was multitasking and he had a mission.’

Police know that Liam was wearing a black and dark green Volcom snow jacket over a green sweater and plaid shirt as well as black snow pants. He had on a black-and-white Levelwear beanie and boots.

At 3.19am, Liam is seen in security video stopping to speak to two men who are not in frame. He points to his right and then walks in that direction.

The men, Hugo Fournier and Guillaume Strub, told investigators that they don’t recall the specifics of their brief interaction with Liam.

Last summer, Fournier told Radio-Canada’s Enquête that he doesn’t remember Liam being in distress. 

‘If there had been an emergency at that time, and I could have seen that he needed a favor, I know we would have helped him, obviously,’ he said, in French.

Fournier told the Daily Mail that he is no longer speaking publicly about his interaction with Liam. 

‘I don’t want to get into any more trouble,’ he said, without elaborating. Strub did not respond to a request for comment.

‘People are afraid to say something,’ says Chris. ‘Somebody knows something. Some people have said they don’t want to talk to the SQ. I’ll stop there.’

On social media, theories about what happened to Liam abound. Some people have suggested that after a night of drinking, Liam must have got lost and succumbed to the bone-chilling cold. 

(‘He could have stayed out of the elements,’ Chris says. ‘We’ve tried to halt all the theories that he couldn’t get back in his hotel.’)

‘A lot of people try to help us and we appreciate all the support but we don’t want people going down certain rabbit holes because we’ve been down all of them.’

Liam’s loved ones have made repeated trips to Mont-Tremblant to raise awareness about the case, put up posters and hand out flyers and wristbands.

In December, the Toman family shared an open letter urging people who were at Tremblant at the same time as Liam to scroll back through their photos and videos and review social media posts.

‘Even the smallest detail could be the key to bringing Liam home,’ the letter read. 

‘A single, previously overlooked photograph, a person in the background of an image, or a passing comment made in a group chat or in a post or tag read even thousands of miles away could provide crucial evidence to advance the case.’

‘Please also consider whether you noticed any awkward situations or interactions of a potentially criminal nature and report these details immediately.’

Tremblant posted the family’s open letter on its website.

In a statement, a representative for Tremblant told the Daily Mail: ‘Since the outset of the search efforts, we have maintained close and ongoing communication with the family and continue to collaborate with the Sûreté du Québec and the local police authorities.’

‘In partnership with the Toman family, several awareness initiatives have been implemented both at the resort and through our communication channels and additional actions are being planned as discussions progress.’

The statement added: ‘Tremblant wishes to reiterate its heartfelt support to the Toman family and everyone affected by this situation. We hope your coverage will help advance efforts to locate Liam Toman.’

Kathleen is not giving up hope that someone will come forward with information about what happened to her son. 

‘Deep in my heart I know that we’re going to find out and how we’re going to find out is through communication,’ she says. 

‘We’re going to solve this keeping up the conversation and talking about it.’

Liam’s mother says when she was at Tremblant in December she was surprised by how many people were not aware of the case. 

‘As a mother you’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, how did you not hear about this?’ I live and breathe, every second, every moment, every night, I can’t even explain,’ she says. 

‘We have to keep pressing and pushing for this information because that one person hasn’t heard yet.’

In November, a reward for information about Liam’s whereabouts was increased from $10,000 to $50,000 CAD. 

Chris says police told him it spawned dozens of leads.

He is optimistic that someone will do the right thing. ‘Every milestone’s hard,’ Chris shares, choking up. 

‘So we want that to weigh on somebody so they will come forward, or get drunk, or break up with a boyfriend or girlfriend and finally say, ‘Yeah, you know what, this is what happened.’ And help break this.’

Chris also wants people to know his son. ‘We don’t want him to be another file, another cold case,’ he says. ‘There’s a personality to him and we want people to know him.’

‘He was very witty, very animated and a smart kid. And that’s why we felt that if something happened to him, he would have found a way to get out of it, had a way to communicate or talk.’

Kathleen describes Liam as social, funny, and loving. 

After he graduated from Niagara College in the spring of 2024 with a diploma in electrical and electronics engineering, he took a job at a resort near her home in Balsam Lake, Ontario.

‘He liked it so much he stayed past the summer and worked until December because he wanted to just play golf and relax until he got his real job in his field,’ she remembers. 

‘It was hard work. Sometimes he came back not so happy about how much hard work.’ She laughs at the memory. 

‘He enjoyed it, it was outdoor work and he was learning new skills.’

Kathleen says the ski trip with his friends was ‘a big deal’ for Liam. And then, ‘life stopped.’

What won’t stop, though, is Kathleen’s quest for answers.

‘We will be there and continue the awareness and move things forward in the best way we think we can because there’s no book of guidelines on what to do here so we’re just pushing through,’ she explains.

‘Some days you’re curled up in a ball into nothing but you meditate your way out of it to say, no I’ve got to keep going and move forward for Liam. We’ve got to do this. 

‘This is for Liam. We’ve got to continue. So, yeah, it’s minute by minute, hour by hour and just continue through.’

Kathleen says she sometimes lays in Liam’s bedroom in her home because it still has his scent. 

‘Everything is set up waiting for him to come home.’

Lara says Liam’s sister Kate and step-siblings are handling Liam’s disappearance in different ways. 

‘It’s a process and it’s going to be a process the rest of their lives because they’ve lost someone they love,’ she explains. 

‘It’s hard. You’ve lost a child but then you’re also having the emotion of his siblings and their loss and how they’re feeling pain and it just adds to your own pain.’

On his 23rd birthday – their first without him – in July, Liam’s parents shared heartfelt messages to him on Facebook.

‘You are more than the silence, more than the missing,’ Chris wrote. ‘Not a day goes by we don’t think of you, our hearts ache not knowing where you are, or what happened. 

‘We pray every day that someone, somewhere, will come forward to bring you home where you belong.’

‘We will never give up on finding you.’

Kathleen wrote: ‘There are no words to fully capture how much you are loved, how much you are missed, or how fiercely we hold on to the hope that you will come home.’

‘You are always with me – in my thoughts, in my heart, in every moment. Your smile, your spirit, and your kindness continues to shine in all those who love you.’

Liam’s mom added: ‘We will never stop searching for you. We will never stop believing that one day, we will bring you home.’