Missing American Travis Timmerman found in Syria is released to U.S. forces, officials say

Travis Timmerman, the missing Missouri man who was unexpectedly found in Syria after he said he crossed into the country to make a “pilgrimage,” was flown out by the U.S. military to Jordan, two U.S. defense officials and his family said Friday.

Family said they had gone several months without any contact from Timmerman, 29, and then saw him in media coverage Thursday after video emerged from Syria leading some to misidentify him as missing American journalist Austin Tice, 43.

“Feels pretty great! Praise the Lord!” Timmerman’s sister, Pixie Rogers, said after learning that he was a step closer to coming home. “I would like for him to know that my whole family and I love him so much and that we are happy to know that we are going to see him soon.”

Syria’s Department of Political Affairs confirmed the transfer in a Telegram post. Timmerman was flown out of Syria via a U.S. military helicopter.

Timmerman, of Urbana, Missouri, a small community north of Springfield, told news outlets he had been imprisoned after he had “been reading the scripture a lot” before deciding to cross the mountains from Lebanon into Syria.

His discovery came as a shock to locals and journalists as thousands of detainees emerged from jails after the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad over the weekend.

Timmerman’s family knew he had traveled to Eastern Europe, including the Czech Republic and Hungary, to write and learn more about God and religion, but when contact dried up after May, 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.

But the family had no clue he ended up in Syria.

“I’m not sure what his thinking was in that,” Rogers said Thursday of her brother entering a country in conflict. “I wouldn’t think he’d do something like that.”

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 without a visa.

“I was in prison for seven months,” Timmerman told NBC News in a building on the outskirts of the capital, Damascus. “But it’s been OK. I am on a pilgrimage and that’s when I was arrested.”

He added that after Syrian authorities picked him up, he was interviewed to determine if he was a “political actor,” but was later cleared.

“Then I was just held in prison,” Timmerman said. “I wasn’t beaten or anything like that.”

Timmerman was freed from captivity on Monday, when rebel forces took control of Damascus and sent Assad fleeing out of the country to ally Russia. Syria had been plunged into a civil war in the wake of the Arab Spring protests of 2011.

After his release, Timmerman said, he was barefoot and alone, sleeping outside and finding temporary refuge with “a friend” and in an abandoned apartment.

Timmerman’s pastor in Missouri, Don Kelderhouse, said he had become baptized in the church about a year and half ago and had been eager to share his faith. His recovery in Syria came as a surprise.

“It’s a miracle,” Kelderhouse said Thursday. “The fact that we think that he hasn’t been abused, that’s another miracle.”

Timmerman’s mother, Stacey Collins Gardiner, told NBC affiliate KSHB of Kansas City that the trip overseas in March was his first time out of the country and that she initially didn’t know any details about his itinerary. He had been calling about three times a week until he went off the grid in May.

Gardiner said she was heartbroken these past months without any word from her son, one of her four children.

“I had happy tears,” she said upon learning he was alive Thursday.

“It was a relief to find out he was still alive,” she added, “because he’s my baby.”