Man, you are a scam magnet. Hope you learnt your lesson from this. Don't trust these people here (or anywhere else as far as bitcoin is involved) without collateral, and then you don't have to trust them anyway.
Well definitely true.
Although you can take collateral whilst lending to someone you cannot take collateral when trading with someone. It's definitely wise to use escrow so that some risk is mitigated that way.
@OP, have you seen his Localbitcoins account? He's still got 92% trust rating but I just saw something curious, his driver's licence/ID was verified.
So maybe you could contact Localbitcoins, and they will help you track this man down.
A very very slim chance though, becasue you didn't conduct the trade through LBC. But worth a try.