"He was smart, he was good looking, he had everything going if he just applied himself. He was a good kid," she said. "My oldest daughter had said he told her with the drugs, that he was really in deep, and he didn't know how he was going to get out of it."
In mid-August of that year, Frank Bresson disappeared. They found his car abandoned in a Riverside parking lot, but there was no sign of him.
The family filed a missing persons report and was waiting on answers for more than a decade.
"What kept me going was thinking that he was in the victim's witness program somewhere living a life, and that's what I kept hoping," Sarah Bresson said.
Early last year, a case worker suggested that the mother and father submit DNA samples to be compared to unidentified bodies. In late November, there was a match.
"The Monday of Thanksgiving week, they came out to tell us they had found his body," she said.
Authorities said Frank Bresson was shot and killed in mid-August of 1995. The body was found around the same time he was reported missing near Rock Mountain Drive and Sandia Creek Drive in Fallbrook, an unincorporated community in northern San Diego County.
The family is frustrated that it took so long to identify the body. Even though it's been almost 16 years, they say the emotional wounds still seem fresh.
"We want justice," said the victim's sister, Marilyn Sullivan. "Maybe he did bad things, maybe he was in over his head, but no human being needs to go through something like that."
"I want to remember him as a real nice, kind individual, but he got mixed up in drugs and that's a bad situation," said his father, Frank Bresson Sr. "I don't want anybody else's kids have happen to them."
Anyone with information in the cold case was asked to call the San Diego County Sheriff's Department at (858) 974-2321.
