BATON ROUGE - Two weeks ago, Nathan Millard was at a daddy-daughter dance with his seven-year-old. Now, his face is on a missing person poster.

Millard was at Happy's Irish Pub last Wednesday. He left the bar at around 11:30 p.m. but never made it back to his hotel.

"It's just shocking to me with the details. When you look at where his phone was found, when you look at where his ATM card was attempted to use and just how it's completely off the path of where he would have gone from the bar to the hotel," said Matt Still, Millard's friend.

His phone was found at the intersection of Convention and North 7th Streets. Later, his ATM card was used at the Greyhound Bus Station on Florida Boulevard.

Baton Rouge police say they're using technology including video surveillance to find Millard. While cases like this are rare, police say they have a method to respond to these situations that they call "grid searches."

"You look at a particular area, and you look for patterns of where that person could have gone," BRPD spokesman L'Jean McKneely told WBRZ.

In this case, there seems to be few patterns. The homeless man police tracked down and questioned was later released.

At one point, police said there could be foul play in this case, but now, they are unsure.

"It's open-ended, so we don't want to say what it is or what it isn't," McKneely said.

That leads some to questions as to why police released the homeless man from their custody if they were unsure of foul play.

"I can't disclose this information at this time," McKneely said.

BRPD also wouldn't say if Millard ended up in the Mississippi River.