Two years after he disappeared from his business near West Chicago, relatives and friends of St. Charles resident John Spira still have few answers to their many questions.

A half-dozen friends passed out fliers and held signs Monday afternoon near County Farm and St. Charles roads outside Universal Cable Construction, the business Spira ran with Dave Stubben for more than a decade. He was last seen at Universal at  7:15 p.m. Feb. 23, 2007, by Stubben and employees of the company.

“We can’t give up,” said Robyn Repeta, a Hoffman Estates resident who organized the gathering on behalf of Spira’s sister, Stephanie McNeil. “We need to know what happened to John.”

Spira, 46, made arrangements to meet a friend at an Oak Brook restaurant for dinner at 8:30 that evening, but never arrived. Friends’ suspicions grew when he didn’t show up the next day at a Montgomery restaurant for a gig with his blues band, the Rabble Rousers.

The St. Charles resident was in the middle of a messy divorce at the time of his disappearance. His estranged wife filed a missing person report with the St. Charles Police Department two days after he was last seen.

A fire broke out at the business in September 2007, almost entirely destroying the building. A 20-foot-by-5-foot banner that friends and family hung across the street from the business two days before the fire also disappeared.

Authorities have released little information about the case. After taking the initial missing person report, St. Charles police turned over the investigation to the DuPage County Sheriff’s Office.

“He’s still considered a missing person and it’s still an ongoing investigation,” Sheriff’s Department spokeswoman Dawn Domrose said.

Stephanie McNeil, Spira’s sister, lives in Phoenix but has traveled to Illinois more than a dozen times since her brother disappeared. She was unable to attend Monday’s event, but was on the telephone with Robyn Repeta as supporters waved signs and distributed information to passing drivers.

She still believes there was foul play involved in her brother’s disappearance.

“He wouldn’t — not ever in a million years — disappear on his own,” McNeil said. “He wasn’t going to go disappear and be a hermit somewhere and leave his friends and family. There’s just no way.”

Spira was an avid blues guitar player, race-car driver and pilot. Last year friends and family marked the first anniversary of his disappearance with an event at Kingston Mines, a Chicago blues club.  

McNeil wants to find out what happened to her brother.

“I hope we find him; I’m not hoping we’ll find him alive,” she said. “It will help with the closure process if we just find him.

“Secondly, I want justice.”

Friends who gathered on County Farm Road on Monday don’t hold much hope that Spira will be found alive.

“At this point, I think after two years of being missing, to think that he’s just walked off somewhere is pretty unrealistic,” said Donna Brownestone, a Wilmette resident who attended New Trier High School with Spira. “I’m sure his family and friends would really hope that, but there’s no way.”

Longtime friend J.T. Stroud of Vernon Hills said he was there to bring attention to a case that has been overshadowed by the disappearances of local women such as Stacy Peterson and Lisa Stebic.

“People figure men can take care of themselves, I guess,” Stroud said. “And so when men disappear, they seem to just fall through the cracks.

“Women, they keep the case open forever, no matter what, and men they just kind of forget about. And we don’t want to forget.”