The Last Place You'd Look (5 page)

“You’re only as good as your first responder. Police really need sensitivity training,” he says.

If anyone can empathize with Drew, it’s Abby Potash, the program manager for Team Hope (www.teamhope.org), a volunteer arm of the National Center for Exploited and Missing Children (NCMEC): her ten-year-old son, Sam, was abducted by his father in July 1997.

Sam’s father was supposed to drop the boy off at camp in New Jersey. Instead, the two lived for months on the run, and Sam would learn to call himself “Ben.” They ended up in Texas.

Abby discovered Sam was missing when she went to pick him up at camp. “He wasn’t there. The first thing I thought was that he’d had an accident,” she says.

Soon it became apparent that Sam was still with his father, who relatives later told her had been acting strangely. Friends and family suggested she call the police, which she did. Soon she felt like a ping-pong ball.

“I called the police in the town where I lived and they couldn’t take the report. They told me to call the town in which Sam’s father lived. I did. They said it wasn’t their jurisdiction and they couldn’t take the report, either. Finally, the police in my town agreed to take it,” says Abby.

Abby checked her ex-husband’s apartment and found “everything gone but the garbage.” And even though she knew her son had been abducted, she still had to battle the criminal justice system.

“The prosecutor thought it was okay because he was with his father. I had to convince him this was a crime,” she says.

Victim’s assistance had no idea how to help her, so Abby had to help herself. She had an old computer and searched the Web looking for help. And she set up her own site, www.findsam.com, which pulled in three hundred thousand hits.

“The computer felt like my umbilical cord,” Abby says.

She says she ran into closed doors everywhere, even with the media. “They’d say, ‘Write something up and we’ll see what we can do.’ They’d say, ‘If I help you, I’ll have to help everyone.’”

She was not sleeping or eating and her life was falling apart. “The walls kept coming down in front of me.”

Abby was in need of some emotional assistance, but no one—least of all the law enforcement officers with whom she was dealing—knew how to give it to her.

Duane Bowers, a therapist, educator, and author, says what Abby needed was someone trained to deal with events like Sam’s abduction.

“She’s second-guessing herself all the way down the line. She needs to think the community is supporting her,” Bowers says.

Bowers and Potash now team up to educate law enforcement and other first responders about how to approach families in crisis mode. They are interested in helping individuals deal with the discovery that a loved one is missing, as in Abby’s case.

Bowers points out that police first responders most often deal with something that has already transpired. A homicide, while terrible, is over when they make contact with the victim’s family. A missing persons case is active. “The trauma is still going on and you’re still in it; it’s still happening,” he says.

Bowers says the victim’s family is going to feel overwhelmed and sometimes without hope. It is up to the officer to be reassuring yet at the same time realistic.

Police need to build bridges with the families of the missing, and when that doesn’t happen, sometimes the families need to be the ones who make the first move. Abby says she dropped by the police department one day and heard a couple of investigators talking about how everyone dumped on them.

“I started bringing them food. I wanted them to want me to come to the station,” she says.

Abby and Sam’s ordeal has a happy ending: he was found and returned to his mother on March 29, 1998, after a woman recognized his image from a picture postcard distributed around the country.

Abby knows that when it comes to the police, the street runs both ways. They are not often thanked for what they do. “I always call them on the anniversary of Sam’s recovery each year,” she says.

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Angela is one of those girls who attracts attention: the brunette stands a willowy five feet, seven inches tall, but it’s her smoky hazel eyes that grab the viewer and make it hard to look away. Being sexy is a good thing if you live in Las Vegas.

Angela worked in Vegas as the head cage cashier at the Monte Carlo. She had a good work history with the club and a great relationship with her family. Then, without warning, things changed. Angela Marie Finger from Salem, Oregon, began dressing and acting like a stranger. It all started, her mom, Michelle Finger, says, when she met a man on the Internet who called himself Craig.

“She was dressing more seductively and acting rude to us. It was uncharacteristic,” says Michelle.

But Angela’s behavioral changes would become even more radical. She quit her job and moved in with Craig. Her parents didn’t trust him, and the more they pushed Angela for answers, the more she in turn pushed them away. Michelle argued with her daughter and Angela either disconnected or changed her phone number. Now, Michelle could neither find nor reach her.

Michelle suffered a heart attack. After she recovered, she says, all she could think about was reconciling with her daughter. She began looking for Angela, but every lead turned cold, and by this point, Michelle had grown suspicious of Craig.

As it turned out, she had good reason to suspect Angela’s new boyfriend. She says after she posted on classmates.com and made a MySpace page using Craig’s assumed name, the real Craig contacted her. He told Michelle that the man impersonating him was William Matthew Smolich, a former classmate.

Researching Smolich on the Internet, Michelle found something that disturbed her even more: pornographic Web sites that appeared to be Smolich’s, featuring nude photographs of Angela.

“My daughter was very modest and dressed very conservative before she met him,” Michelle says.

But that wasn’t the only thing giving Michelle pause. She also discovered that Smolich is a man with a dark and disturbing legal history: he is wanted by the Boulder, Colorado, sheriff’s department on charges of attempted sexual assault on a child and nonconsensual sexual contact.

Michelle tracked Angela down through the Web sites. When she called Angela, she says Smolich answered and put her daughter on the phone. Michelle told her what she had found out about the man and within thirty seconds the phone went dead. She called back and the call went straight to voice mail. It was the last time she or anyone she knows had any contact with her daughter.

Michelle says one police officer told her that if she was going to pursue the case on her own, then he wasn’t going to waste his own time. When police showed up at the residence Smolich was sharing with Angela, they found the place had been deserted: all of Angela’s stuff was still there, even her kitten. A stakeout of the place revealed the couple was not coming back. Michelle is heartbroken that her daughter has disappeared from her life. She fears the worst.

“It is like she has fallen off the face of the earth. Another birthday, another Christmas, another New Year’s without her. We are heartsick,” she says.

The Finger family has been unhappy with law enforcement’s response. They have dealt with several levels of bureaucracy, from local to federal, and with agencies from several different states. Many times it is this mix of agencies that frustrates families.

When David Potts of Florissant, Missouri, went missing, his parents also found themselves dealing with more than one police agency. The experience has left them perplexed, upset, and feeling as though they’ve been given the runaround.

Robin Potts says her family’s nightmare started when a then twenty-one-year-old David went out with a friend on October 28, 2006. The two men had left a club and were traveling along Highway 70 in St. Ann, Missouri, when an officer spotted the car and ordered the driver to pull over. Instead, a high-speed pursuit ensued.

The Missouri State Highway Patrol joined the chase. When they hit a bridge, they say David jumped out of the car and ran. Officers chased him and one said he jumped over the railing. No one knows if he landed on the catwalk below or fell into the water.

His family had no idea that David had vanished until October 30, when he failed to show up for work. On October 31, they contacted St. Ann’s police department and were told that David was considered a fugitive rather than a missing person. Robin asked that an officer contact her. No one did.

Frustrated, Robin called back the next day and was told that her son was “wanted,” not missing, and that the officer involved in the pursuit would contact her.

“No one has ever called me,” says Robin almost four years later.

Robin reported her son missing to the St. Louis County Police later that same day. On November 2, she says they asked the St. Ann police to launch a search for their son but never heard back. With assistance from the Shawn Hornbeck Foundation (www.shawnhornbeckfoundation.com), the Potts family and volunteers, along with the Missouri Water Patrol, searched the banks of the Missouri River, as well as the water. Robin says the river was dragged, but nothing—not even a footprint—was found.

Today, the Potts family worries and wonders what happened that night. They remain unimpressed by the efforts of law enforcement agencies.

For every family like the Potts or the Fingers who comes away from their experience with little faith in their police, there are those who report better rapport. Christy Davis says that although her son remains missing, she believes the police are sincere in their efforts to locate him.

Austin Davis was born on April 24, 1981, and disappeared on June 26, 2007, in Jacksonville, Florida. His dimpled smile, which gives him an almost cherubic appearance, did not reflect his frame of mind when he disappeared, according to his mom. Christy says that before he vanished Austin had suffered some personal difficulties that “left him depressed and looking for direction.”

On the last day Austin was known to be in Jacksonville, he asked his boss for a day off and was approved for leave on June 25. But on June 26, his employer reported that he did not show up for work nor did he call in. All attempts to reach Austin proved unsuccessful.

His family was notified and they called the police. Christy says, “We were fortunate in that law enforcement was very responsive.”

An investigation revealed that Austin had gone to a local Walmart, purchased shells for a shotgun, and then walked to a pawnshop, where he bought the shotgun itself. Austin was last seen walking down the street with the shotgun’s muzzle protruding from a duffle bag he carried. An inspection of his apartment revealed that he left his backpack and laptop computer behind, something Christy says is out of character for her son.

“He didn’t go anywhere without taking those things,” she says.

Years have now passed and no sign of Austin has ever been found. Christy says his last paycheck was neither collected nor cashed. The family fears the worst, but also hopes for the best. They want Austin to come home and have tried to keep his name in the news. Christy says an encounter with someone who told her that Austin’s story was “boring” made her realize that not all missing persons are equal.

“What about all those families that have a story to tell that may not be interesting to anyone but their family, the stories that don’t get you on the edge of your seat . . . aren’t these ‘lost’ stories just as important?” she asks.

Christy rates law enforcement as more responsive than the media in her son’s case, although she believes they should have shared more of the investigative details with the family.

“Our law enforcement experience is so much better than many stories I’ve heard from other families of missing persons where sometimes the family couldn’t even get [them] to take a report, but even so after an interview with the detective assigned to our case, he told me that their resources are limited and . . . the family would have to take up the slack,” she says.

The Davis family has been searching for Austin since June 26, 2007. Christy says they won’t stop looking until they find him.

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Two and a half decades ago, the Diaz family experienced the loss of their son and brother, Carlos. His disappearance has led them through a bitter lesson in the workings of bureaucracy.

Brooklyn born and raised, Carlos was thirty-two at the time he vanished. The beloved family dog had died in his arms. Carlos left the house with the dog’s body, telling his family he would bury her. When he walked out the door, he also walked out of their lives. He has not been seen since.

Carlos was struck in the head some time before his disappearance and doctors warned he could suffer from memory loss at some point. He had no identification on him at the time he vanished, says his family, who worries that he could have become disoriented and not have known who he was or where he belonged.

His sister, Nancy Freneire, says when they tried to report him missing, the police told them that because Carlos was between sixteen and fifty-five, there was no crime involved; thus they would not take a report.

“My sister and mother were baffled upon learning that such a rule existed,” says Nancy.

Nancy says that the lack of documentation has meant that the media has not taken them seriously. “Every attempt to search for my brother has been denied because we do not have a missing persons report,” she says.

After years of battling the system, Nancy was able to get her own DNA into the national database so that it can be compared against unidentified remains. And the family continues its struggle to bring attention to their plight.

“I know there is a light at the end of this tunnel,” she says. Until it shines on the Diaz family, they will keep searching for Carlos.

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For many decades the plight of missing adults was shrugged off both by police and the legal system. In many cases, police refused to take reports because neither law nor internal police procedures compelled them to do so. Or they fell back on the old “forty-eight hour rule” (or twenty-four, depending on the jurisdiction), which, in essence, says that a person must be missing for the allotted amount of time before they’ll take a report.