The FBI believes a California firefighter staged his Suisun Bay drowning more than three years ago to avoid child pornography charges, and agents report multiple sightings since.
Charles Johnathen Harris, an Alameda County Fire Department firefighter, was reported drowned on April 4, 2023, during a night fishing trip with his brother on Suisun Bay north of Concord. The boat was recovered. His remains never were.
Federal agents now say that disappearance looks staged. Harris had just been indicted on a federal child pornography charge, released on bond, and faced a coming court date he never kept. The Yahoo News report details the FBI San Francisco office’s renewed public appeal for tips more than three years later.
Scott Schelble, special agent in charge of the FBI’s San Francisco office, has made the agency’s position plain: the death may not have been real, and people have claimed to see Harris alive afterward.
"We have received, on more than one occasion, a sighting, a reported sighting of Charles Harris since the time of his alleged death,"
Schelble said.
Indictment came weeks before the boat capsized
A federal grand jury indicted Harris on March 2, 2023. Prosecutors charged him with possessing child pornography on his iPhone, including images involving prepubescent children. The case started with a tip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Prosecutors contended he uploaded material through the Kik app, including while at Alameda County fire stations.
Harris surrendered and appeared in federal court in Oakland on March 7. He was released on bond with restricted internet access. His next court date was set for April 19.
Fifteen days before that hearing, he went fishing at night with his brother. The brother swam to safety and reported that their boat had capsized. Search efforts found the boat. They never found Harris.
On April 21, 2023, a federal arrest warrant issued in Oakland charged him with failure to appear. That warrant still stands. The pattern mirrors other federal manhunts in which suspects try to vanish after serious charges, much like cases where the FBI joins an international manhunt after violent crimes.
Wanted notice lists scars, aliases, and recent photos
The FBI’s wanted notice identifies Harris by the aliases Chuck Harris and Charlie Harris. It lists him as 5 feet 10 inches tall and 220 pounds, with red hair, blue eyes, and light burn scars on his hands. He was born in Modesto and would now be 46. The notice includes photographs taken in 2019 and 2023.
Agents say they refreshed the hunt after conversations with family and close contacts, plus new tips. Anyone with information is asked to contact a local FBI office or submit a tip online. The same federal pressure that closes cold cases and disrupts plots, seen when the FBI DNA genealogy program identifies a suspect, is now aimed at locating a man who was supposed to answer for the material on his phone.
The Washington Examiner reported the core suspicion in blunt terms: the FBI suspects the former firefighter staged his own death to avoid facing the federal child sexual abuse material charges.
Bond conditions did not keep him in the system
Harris walked out of the Oakland courthouse in March 2023 under court-ordered limits on his internet use. Less than a month later he was gone from the water and missing from the docket. The failure-to-appear warrant followed two days after the missed April 19 date.
No legal declaration of death is described in the available record. What the record does show is an open federal warrant, unrecovered remains, and repeated claimed sightings after the alleged drowning. Disappearance cases that drag on without a body often draw sustained FBI attention, as in the long-running scrutiny around the Nancy Guthrie case and collapsed ransom tips.
Harris remains presumed innocent of the underlying charge unless and until proven guilty in court. That presumption does not erase the warrant for skipping court or the FBI’s public statement that the drowning may have been staged.
Public tips are the next pressure point
Schelble’s office is not treating the April 2023 water incident as a closed tragedy. Multiple reported sightings after the “death,” combined with the timing, indictment, bond, missed hearing, vanishing, drive the current appeal.
Federal investigators have used public tips and joint operations to stop other serious threats before they fully matured, including when the Texas DPS and FBI arrested a Converse man over a planned attack and when agents moved on an alleged Capitol bombing plot. The same tip lines are open on Harris.
The wanted notice is live. The failure-to-appear warrant is live. The child pornography indictment is still the reason he was under court supervision when he disappeared.
When a defendant charged with possessing images of prepubescent children skips court and leaves no body behind, the public is right to expect the FBI to treat “drowned” as a lead to check, not a conclusion to accept.
