Actor Listed as Missing 2 Weeks After Disappearance

On April 3, actor David Hanson--best known for playing an amiable jock on NBC’s Saturday morning series “Hang Time”--walked out of a friend’s house to get a carton of milk and never returned, friends say.

Two weeks later, the Los Angeles Police Department has listed him as a missing person.

Hanson’s manager and best friend, Jeff Ballard, said he called police after Hanson--who he described as depressed over his personal and professional life--failed to show up for a play rehearsal April 8. “This play was the most important thing in his life,” said Ballard. “It’s out of character for him to disappear and not call anyone.”

Hanson, a Santa Monica resident, was staying with Ballard in Ballard’s Sherman Oaks home the night he disappeared.

Hanson used a credit card on April 6 and left a message on his former girlfriend’s answering machine on April 9, Ballard said. Det. Terri Hernandez, of the Missing Persons Unit, characterized the message as “apologetic.”

“We don’t expect that there is any foul play, but we haven’t ruled it out,” she said. “Ninety-six percent of the time [missing persons] return.”

After only one season with “Hang Time,” Hanson was replaced by another actor last year. Since then Hanson has been going to auditions for other roles with little success. For two months before he disappeared, Hanson was rehearsing for a play called “I Never Saw Another Butterfly” to be staged at Valley Beth Shalom Temple in Encino.

Hanson has acted in music videos by Bel Biv Devoe and Robert Palmer and television commercials for Big Red chewing gum, Millers Outpost and Wheaties cereal. Since leaving “Hang Time,” Ballard said, Hanson has been frustrated with an acting career that “wasn’t going the way he wanted it to go.”

“He was certainly depressed,” Ballard said. “He had just broken up with his girlfriend of four years.”