What happened to Jake Harris from Deadliest Catch? The internet keeps killing him off

Type his name into Facebook search and you'll find posts announcing his death outright, complete with a suspiciously smooth photo and a link to an obituary blog nobody has heard of. Type it into Google and the autocomplete tries to finish the sentence for you.

None of it checks out. No credible outlet has reported Jake Harris's death, and Discovery — which has publicly acknowledged every real loss among its cast, and there have been a lot of them — has said nothing, because there's nothing to say. The rumor mill runs on two things: a genuinely alarming stretch of his life that ended in an ICU, and the fact that he stopped speaking publicly four years ago.

He left the Cornelia Marie in 2013, and addiction was the reason

Jake joined the show in season 2 alongside his father, Captain Phil Harris, and older brother Josh. Season 6 caught the low point on camera: Phil, laid up with back pain, discovers his son has been stealing his painkillers. "You're a thief and a liar," Phil tells him. Jake answers, "I'm an addict."

Phil suffered a stroke that January while offloading opilio crab at St. Paul Island and died of an intracranial hemorrhage on February 9, 2010, at 53. Jake was 24, and the habit predated all of it.

"In high school I was a skater and it turned out I wasn't very good. I broke some limbs is how I got addicted to opiates. [I] got a big hole in my heart and tried to fill it up with everything that wasn't good for it," he told Dr. Drew Pinsky in 2011.

He left the franchise in 2013 hoping to enter rehab. "My brother's been going through issues. He's lost in drugs still," Josh told HuffPost at the time.

The 2016 attack that fuels most of the fake obituaries

In November 2016, Harris accepted a ride from a man and woman he'd met the night before while gambling at Quil Ceda Creek Casino in Washington. Court documents reported by the Daily Herald describe him being choked and beaten in the car, then left on the side of a road in Everett, where a passerby found him. He had a fractured skull, brain swelling, broken blood vessels in both eyes, and bruising around his throat. His wallet and $2,400 were gone.

Josh posted the news himself, which is how it reached fans — and why the version now circulating as "Jake Harris passed away after a brutal assault and robbery" sounds plausible to people who half-remember it. Everett police officer Aaron Snell told PEOPLE that medics found Harris "alert, conscious, answering questions and breathing." He recovered. Two suspects were arrested.

The legal record since

• May 2017 — A Maricopa County judge issued a bench warrant after Harris missed a court date in Phoenix on two felony drug possession charges involving meth and Xanax, Fox News reported.
• 2019 — Sentenced to 18 months on DUI and drug charges.
• May 2021 — Arrested in Washington State after being clocked at 86 mph in a 70 zone, and booked for felony DUI and driving on a suspended license.
• 2021 — Charged with intent to manufacture and distribute heroin.

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Where he actually is

He resurfaced twice: one episode of Deadliest Catch season 16 in 2020, then the April 20, 2021 premiere of Bloodline season 2, feeding Josh leads from their father's old Hawaii fishing charts, plus a few episodes of season 3 in 2022.

"He's doing really well. He has a new lady in his life, and she's got five kids, so he's a stay-at-home dad, which has been great for him," Josh told Patheos in 2021. "He's happy. He calls me three times a day."

In 2022 he announced the birth of his daughter, Tru, with his wife Shawna Brinkly, writing that it had been "the most memorable, enjoyable, suspenseful, and remarkable month of my existence." Reality Shrine reported in May 2026, citing a post by her brother, that Shawna died in August 2023. Jake's own last Facebook post was in 2022.

Josh, for his part, was cut from Deadliest Catch in 2022 before season 19 when a 1998 case resurfaced; he had pleaded to a lesser charge and served nine months in 1999. Neither brother is on the show now, which leaves the Harris name generating traffic with nobody attached to it — ideal conditions for a fake obituary.

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