True Crime Society – Lost in the Snow – Where is Liam Toman?

Liam Toman (22) went missing from Mont-Tremblant, Quebec in Canada on February 2, 2025.  We have just passed the one-year anniversary of his disappearance.  Liam was on a ski weekend with friends when he disappeared.

Liam Gabriel Toman was born in July 2002 to Kathleen and Chris Toman.  We believe he has one full sister to those parents, named Kate. His parents later divorced and he also now has step-siblings.  His father’s new wife is Lara Toman.  The media have reported that he came from a ‘big’ family. 

Liam lived in Whitby, Ontario in early 2025.   Liam had graduated from Niagara College in 2024 with a diploma of electrical and electronics engineering and he had plans to begin his career in that industry.  He had been working at a resort near Balsam Lake in Ontario in the meantime.  

Kathleen said of that job ‘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.  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.’

Liam’s family and friends have said that he was very social.  He had “an amazing sense of humour, a silly laugh, love(d) McDonald’s or sushi, and never said no to a good steak (especially when he barbecued it)”.  He also enjoyed skiing, golf, video games, car mechanics and spending time with his friends.

On Friday, January 31, 2025, Liam and two of his friends- Kyle Warnock and Colin Lemmings – hit the road and headed to Mont- Tremblant ski resort.  This was around a 5 hour/ 555km/340mile drive. 

Colin spoke to the media about the destination and said “It just opens up, and then there’s the hill with all the cabins on the side of it, and then the mountain just goes up.  It’s a pretty big eye shock for us because we don’t see something like that very often.”

The group checked into their hotel:

On Saturday February 1, 2025, the men spent the day on the slopes.  They then had pizza for dinner and afterwards, went for some drinks at a bar called Lucille’s.

The night was freezing – around -25c which is -13f.

At around 11pm, Colin decided to go back to their hotel.  Kyle and Liam decided to head to a club called Le P’tit Caribou.

“We had a couple of more drinks and then kind of split up inside,” Kyle would later say.

Liam filmed this footage inside the club that night – https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/9.7047420

According to google, the club remains open until around 3am.  Kyle has said that night though, it began to get empty at around 2am (this is according to CBC).  Kyle texted Liam and got no response, so he decided to head back to the hotel.  

There is a slight discrepancy between the time in the CBC article and other timelines online.  Other sources indicate that Kyle left at around 2.30am but that there were still people at the bar.  At 2.45am, Liam was seen approaching a group of women.  Another man saw this happen.  He approached Liam and said those women were with their partners and they chatted for a bit.  

Security camera footage showed Liam finishing a beer and playfully grabbing an empty glass off the bar. A bouncer grabbed him by the back of his neck and escorted him out of the premises.

According to CBC, Liam was seen leaving the club with two women at 3am.  As they walked, they passed by two men fighting.  Liam said something to them but the two men apparently laughed because he spoke in English.  There is some discussion online about this as many disagree that Liam left with women and said that he actually left alone. 

At 3.10am, Liam was seen on CCTV walking ‘briskly’ towards his hotel.  

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

At 3.16am, he sent a text to his father saying ‘Meet me outside.’   It is believed that Liam actually meant to send this text to one of the friends he was traveling with. 

The last sighting of Liam came at 3.20am.  He was seen on CCTV near his hotel.  He was speaking with two people who were later identified as seasonal workers.  Those people would later say they had a short chat and Liam did not seem distressed.

This info about that interaction is from the Daily Mail:

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.

There is no footage of Liam entering the hotel.  Instead, he went to the side of the hotel near Chemin au Pied-de-la-Montagne. He has not been seen since.  His phone, bank accounts and social media have not been accessed since he sent that last text message.  

According to reddit, Liam’s phone remained active and online until 6.24pm on Sunday February 2, 2025.  This information is cited as coming from Liam’s dad. 

When Liam’s friends realised that he had not returned to the hotel, they assumed he had slept elsewhere.  They started calling him again and again in the morning.  “I called once every hour,” said Kyle “And then after a couple hours, I was calling him twice an hour. And I started calling him three times an hour, and 20 calls later, we’re, like: ‘OK, maybe … something is up, for sure.’”

His friends did hit the slopes that day, likely assuming that Liam would turn up.  When he had not shown up by day’s end, they contacted his family and the authorities.

The men contacted Liam’s family just before 6pm on February 2.

His father Chris has spoken about that call.  “I said, ‘We need to talk to the police. We need to talk to the resort. Like, you know, we don’t know where he is?’” he told the media.

Kathleen has spoken about hearing the news from Chris.  ‘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.’

Chris, along with his current wife Lara, and Kathleen, drove through the night during a snowstorm to Tremblant.  

“I couldn’t believe how fast, but how long it felt as well,” Lara told the media.  

The group arrived in the area at around 4am on February 3.  Kathleen and Lara have said they 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 said. ‘He’s not in the snow. He’s not here.’

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

The search for Liam lasted for 12 days.  Authorities used horses and dogs, as well as ATVS, snowmobiles and helicopters to try to find him.

“The helicopter was flying so low, it was almost in my living room,” Mont-Tremblant resident Sylvie Blais told the media.

Yves Delvallet, owner of Mont-Tremblant Cruises, turned his daily dog walks into a months-long, systematic search for Liam.

The community reached out and tried to support Liam’s family.  Kathleen said “It gives you — I know it’s like a cliche — but … faith in humanity,” she said.

Liam’s family said that they were not aware of any mental health struggles that he was going through that may have caused him to vanish.

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

No trace of Liam was found. 

The snow finally started to melt at the end of March 2025.  On March 22, a resort worker found Liam’s wallet.  His driver’s license, credit card and hotel access card were still inside.  

After that discovery, authorities searched for Liam again and nothing more was found.  Additional searches were conducted in April and November 2025.

Kathleen said “When you’re in this situation, you don’t know what you need to do,” she said.

“You’re not an investigator. You’re not the police. You give all your hands to the police, you trust they know everything. So you just want to … you have to do something. You can’t sit still. 

“You have to keep going and pushing to find any means to solve this because it’s such a mystery. It does not make sense. None of the pieces make sense in your mind. You cannot rest.”

“You spend so many days busy and doing and co-ordinating,” she said. “And then there’s days where you’re just crawled up in a ball and not moving.

“And then you go: ‘My gosh, we’ll have to keep going for Liam. Liam wouldn’t want to see me like this. Oh my gosh, he’d want me to keep fighting and keep going and looking and investigating. So then you focus, you focus on the fact of what you’re doing, you get up and go.”

The Quebec provincial police, the Sûreté du Québec (SQ) gave a statement about the case to the CBC:

“When doing an investigation about missing persons, everything is on the table.  “It’s a disappearance that’s pretty rare,” said the SQ’s spokesperson, citing the lack of clear evidence explaining why Liam is missing. 

“It’s important for the public to think the unthinkable. Any shred of information can be crucial.”

Liam’s father told the media that he believes his son 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 (SQ) told the media 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.

July 2025 marked Liam’s 23rd birthday.

His family made tributes to him.

You are more than the silence, more than the missing,’ Chris wrote on social media. ‘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.’

‘We’re in trauma – continuous trauma,’ his mother Kathleen told the Daily Mail. ‘You don’t cope with it and you take it hour by hour.’

She admits she still struggles to process what has happened: ‘I still can’t even digest the thought that Liam is missing. It’s surreal.’

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.’

February 2, 2026 marked one year since Liam disappeared.  The SQ set up a command post near the hotel that Liam had been staying at.  Authorities said they hoped the timing of the set up might jog someone’s memory.

SQ Sgt. Marc Tessier said the goal was to meet with tourists and regulars who make an annual trip to the resort.

“We think that it’s important to be there on the same weekend that he was there,” Sgt Tessier said. 

“Maybe you have some people that went during that same weekend last year that they’re coming back.”

Kathleen also went back to the scene for the anniversary.  “We’re hopeful that maybe some visitors will be coming back from anywhere in this world and be reminded, and hopefully come back with some memories or some thoughts that will help us move the case forward,” she said.

Kathleen has asked that anyone who was at the resort around February 2025 to look through their photos, noting that even the smallest detail in the background of a picture could provide a breakthrough.

“One year — it’s not something you want to celebrate,” Kathleen said.  ‘It’s not something you want to acknowledge, that it is actually one year,” “But, you do want to, for Liam. You want to say, ‘This has been too long. This is a year. What is, where is he, what’s going on?’ ”

She also said that she has not given up hope of finding 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 by keeping up the conversation and talking about it.’

Kathleen said that she is surprised there are still people in the area who do not know about Liam’s 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.’

Chris said ‘Every milestone’s hard.’ 

‘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.’

In a statement, a representative for Tremblant told the media  ‘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.’

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.

A $50,000 reward is being offered for any information that leads to locating the young man. Police are asking anyone with information to contact the SQ.

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