(NewsNation) — Jesse Farber’s family and friends should be celebrating his 40th birthday. Instead, they are still reliving a frantic phone call from August of 2015 before he disappeared.

Farber’s girlfriend, Rachel Carroll, has been looking for him for 10 years.

“We were best friends before we went into a relationship and we became parents together and we grew up together,” she said. “He was with me all the time and he’s missing, so part of me is missing out there.”

An argument before Jesse Farber’s disappearance

On Aug. 1, 2015, the couple had gotten into an argument over some missing money from Farber’s paychecks. He left their Pennsylvania apartment to stay at his grandmother’s and some friends’ houses for the next week.

Carroll said his mind was burdened.

“The last day that I physically seen Jese was Aug. 8,” Caroll said. “He said to me he had to do something on his own and basically, when he dealt with that, that everything would be okay and he’d come back home and we’d be back together again. Which made me worry even more because it seemed like there was definitely something going on.”

Two days later, on Monday, Aug. 10, Farber skipped work. Carroll said she heard he met with a woman, trying to get some money back that she had taken from him. Then, he stayed with friends from that crowd overnight.

Jesse Farber’s last known activities

Although Carroll says he wasn’t known to use drugs, Farber used meth and played video games well into the night.

Private investigator Steve Fischer said Facebook messages provide insight into the evening.

“He had done some meth, he had tried to purchase some more and there was a girl who tried to rip him off,” Fischer said. “There’s some conversations that day, the day he went missing. They’re back and forth about him trying to recover that money.”

“None of these people were somebody in his daily life or anything. Everything about this is very out of character for him,” Carroll said.

A terrifying phone call

At 8:43 on the night of Aug. 11, Carroll got a frantic call from Farber.

“He said, ‘Bring guns, I’m in a tree, 10 to 11 coyotes are after me and my phone’s gonna die,'” Carroll said. “It was really quiet in the background. It didn’t sound like there were animals around him or anything like that. It’s definitely a possibility that he was hallucinating.”

Farber and Carroll knew the woods. But Farber gave Carroll two locations from which he was calling; one on a mountain by the high school, the other a mountain by the elementary school.

The two locations were across town from each other.

“Then he went back and said, ‘No, I’m at Tamaqua High School, the mountain up there,'” Carroll said.

She asked him if he was sure and he said yes.

“Then I asked him, ‘Well, where exactly are you at,’ and that’s when the phone died,” she said.

Searching for Jesse Farber

Search teams and cadaver dogs searched the mountain behind the high school.

“There was dive teams, there was a mine shaft search, all kinds of stuff and I’d say for about eight years, that’s where we searched,” Carroll said.

Eight years of searching yielded few results. Two bags were found, but Carroll never saw them.

She was told the first bag, found in 2015 on the mountain near the elementary school, had Farber’s license in it. The second bag, found a year later in a tree, had clothing and a phone charger in it. But there’s no way for Carroll to verify either discovery.

So she hired Fischer as a private investigator. Through phone records and data analysis, Fischer discovered Farber’s phone actually pinged off the other mountain location Farber had mentioned, behind the elementary school.

“We think we’ve got a one-mile area that varies in width by a couple hundred yards. So it’s not a huge area, but it’s a tricky area and it’s along a ridgeline and there are open mine shafts in that area.”

“Some of the holes that I’ve seen, it’s crazy to look at,” Carroll said. “It’s straight up and down and if you’re running in the dark and you slid into one and fell, there’s no doubt that he got hurt and he wouldn’t have seen it coming.”

Raising money for professional searchers

For now, Carroll is raising money to hire a team for a more extensive search into the mines.

“With the professionals, you can bring in equipment. They can bring in sonar for underwater and stuff,” Carroll said. “All the stuff, it would help eliminate a lot of options.”

Fischer has his own theory.

“He was scared of whatever he was perceiving. He felt he was being chased, and he was in the dark, and there are some sheer drop-offs there,” Fischer said. “Unfortunately, you can literally run right off a cliff.”

Carroll just wants closure for herself and the couple’s children.

“I understand I might never know what happened, but if I could bring him home to our kids and give him peace, that’s what matters most,” she said.