Yet another set of disappearances from an institution

Earlier on this blog I wrote about three teenage boys who all disappeared (years apart) from the same treatment facility for troubled youths and were never found. Well, I have just discovered another set of disappearances from another institution, in this case a state-operated institution for retarded people.

Seventeen-year-old Steven Eugene Anderson and twelve-year-old David Williams disappeared together from the New Lisbon State School for Retarded Males in 1975 and were never found. Steven was moderately retarded (from his picture he looks like he might have Downs Syndrome). I don’t have any info on David’s mental condition, but I know he takes medication, and I listed him as mentally disabled since he did, after all, live at the school.

I just found the NamUs profile of 46-year-old Kenneth Arthur Schweighart, who disappeared from New Lisbon State School in 1982. From what little information is available, the circumstances look about the same: walked off campus and vanished without a trace, no evidence to speak of.

I think this is rather odd, to say the least.

The New Lisbon State School is now called the New Lisbon Developmental Center. According to the New Jersey Department of Human Services, it houses over 400 people. It’s coed now and only serves those 18 and up. I wish I could find info as to what the place was like in the seventies and eighties.

I wonder if anyone has looked really hard at the school and its employees? Were there any more links between the 1975 disappearances and the 1982 one, besides the location? I can see one retarded guy wandering off. But three? Were Steven and David supervised? It seems to me that a seventeen-year-old and a twelve-year-old with mental disabilities should not be able to just leave campus without someone with them. I would love to know more about these cases but I can’t find much. As ever.

Parents in China searching for their children

Earlier I wrote on this blog about child trafficking in China. As many as 200,000 children (or about as many people as live in Little Rock, Arkansas) are being kidnapped every year for this purpose. I didn’t realize grown men were being taken, though, until I read this article, which mentions two men in their twenties who were kidnapped by traffickers and have been missing for several years.

The older people being taken are apparently being enslaved under very harsh conditions. One teen who was missing for two years before being able to escape “laboured in a brick kiln in Henan with more than 200 others, and wore clothes with the number 203 sewed on. She says he saw six people beaten to death in his two years there.” That reminds me of a Russian gulag. Or a Nazi concentration camp.

China, which will probably be the big superpower of the 21st century, is still trying to improve its human rights record. It seems like it would serve the nation’s interests and improve its reputation if it would put together an aggressive effort to curb human trafficking and bring the perpetrators to justice.

Boatload of people added to Missouri Highway Patrol site

The Missouri Highway Patrol, which lists missing people from that state, has added quite a lot of missing adults to their listings. Unfortunately most of them don’t have posters and some don’t even have pictures. I will have to post a lot of bare-bones casefiles for these people, but it’s better than nothing. Maybe posters for them will be added soon.

Two runaways

As I noted on Charley yesterday, Nicholas Francisco was found alive and well. Unconfirmed sources placed him in California. He was 28 and married with two kids and another on the way when he vanished off the face of the earth from Washington State in February 2008. Nicholas’s case got more attention than most missing men’s cases do, I think in large part because his wife was very vocal and active in the search for him. At first she insisted he would never have abandoned the family and must have been murdered. But four months later, she filed for divorce citing “willful abandonment.” She said she found evidence that Nicholas was living a double life, with secret bank accounts and such. Some comments I’ve seen online claim he was having sexual contacts with men he’d met on the internet. If so, how humiliating for the wife! She has already remarried.

As far as I’m concerned, that kind of behavior is inexcusable. A real man, gay or otherwise, does not walk out on his wife when she’s pregnant and unemployed. A real man doesn’t abandon his young children without a word. Nicholas apparently found his home life intolerable — okay, I’ll buy that. So find a lawyer, get a divorce, divide up the marital assets, set up a custody arrangement and pay child support. Don’t just leave. That’s the worst thing, the very cruelest thing you can ever do to those that love you.

Also, as I will put up on Charley today, Theresa Marie Meadows has been located. She was sixteen when she ran away from Mechanicsville, Virginia in September 2004. Her case was a bit unusual because, except for a letter her guardian got six weeks after her disappearance, it appeared that no one ever heard from her again, and she never used her Social Security number or anything like that, so there was no paper trail. Theresa was located in Florida recently, after over five years. She’d been living under an assumed name and without documents. I expect her life has been pretty hard. She’s talked on the phone with her mother but they haven’t met yet. Theresa’s mom was in drug treatment when her daughter disappeared, which is why Theresa was living with a guardian. I hope Theresa is happy and will be able to live an easier life now that she is now longer listed as a missing person.

News on murder-without-a-body cases

The jury in the Aarone Thompson trial has still not reached a verdict, and it’s been over a week. They say the longer a jury is out, the more likely they are to acquit or to hang. But in this case they’re considering dozens of charges. I have confidence that they will do their duty.

A trial date has been set for Geralyn Graham, the accused murderer of Rilya Wilson. Rilya’s case gained national notoriety when it was discovered that she, a Florida foster child, had been missing for a year and a half without the Florida Department of Children and Families finding out. Geralyn was her foster mother. I’m a bit concerned about this case. Geralyn killed Rilya, I’m quite sure — but can they prove it? There’s very little evidence and a principal witness has backed out. Anyway, Geralyn is scheduled to be tried in March. She could face the death penalty if convicted.

Two suspects have finally been indicted in the presumed kidnapping and murder of Donald Dietz, a Michigan man who disappeared in September 2007. He was vulnerable — one account I read said he was autistic, though I’m not sure how they’d know — and he had a lot of money, and the police think these two guys killed him and stole his identity. Another article is here.

Another for the ???? Category

I’m writing today’s updates and recorded the case of Wojciech Fudali, who disappeared from Rhode Island last December after a late-night party with friends. Sounds typical on the surface, except that Fudali was stark naked when he vanished. He left his shoes and every stitch of clothing behind. In New England. In December.

This article says, “While police interviewed some of his friends at the East Shore Road house Sunday afternoon, a friend arrived and said he saw Fudali running nude near the Galilee Escape Road around 11:30 a.m. Saturday but did not report it to police.” What’s going on there? If I saw any of my friends running in the buff down the road at any time of year, never mind the dead of winter, I’d probably call 911 on the spot. At the very least I’d be yelling, “Hey! What’s going on? Why are you naked? Are you okay?”

Other articles say Fudali was a “nature lover,” so perhaps he dabbled in nudism before. But being naked in public in suburban Rhode Island IN DECEMBER is not normal, even for nudists.

I think he’s got to be dead. A naked person could not survive more than a couple of hours outside in below-freezing temperatures. What caused him to leave the house in that condition, I wonder? Was he depressed and trying to commit suicide by hypothermia? If so, why didn’t he go off somewhere where no one could see him, not lounge around in public places? Was he whacked out on some kind of drugs or something, did he have a psychotic episode? That poor guy. He had just gotten his college degree, too.

Soldiers from mass grave in Turkey identified

Back in 2006, officials from the United Nations Committee on Missing Persons located a mass grave of nineteen people in northern Turkey. According to this article, five of the bodies have been identified as Greek Cypriot soldiers. 35 years ago Turkey invaded Cyprus (which, for the uninitiated, is an island nation in the Mediterranean sea, which is bilaterally divided into the “Greek side” and the “Turkish side”) and about 1600 people disappeared without a trace, not just soldiers either: there were over a hundred kids under seventeen and over three hundred old people sixty and over. (These numbers come from the Missing Cypriots website.) Very few of them have ever been found. The last sign of those particular five disappeared people was when they were photographed upon surrendering to the Turks and becoming prisoners of war. The oldest man was thirty years old, the youngest only nineteen. I’m not 100% sure but it looks like the other fourteen people in the grave are still unidentified.

That Turkey has committed war crimes (the Armenian genocide of the nineteen-teens also comes to mind) is not shocking to me. Many countries have done so — not that that doesn’t make a terrible thing, but what I’m saying is that Turkey is hardly alone in having committed atrocities. But they should at least admit it. Turkey has maintained a stony silence as to the 1974 invasion and what happened to the missing Cypriots. And they won’t even acknowledge the existence of the Armenian genocide. I am not holding present-day Turks responsible for what their fathers and grandfathers did, but the government should do the right thing and fess up and try to make amends, rather like Germany has. Revealing the ultimate fate of all the missing Cypriots, uncovering more mass graves if necessary, would be a good start.

Having a relative who is missing for political reasons or war-related reasons has got to be at least as stressful as having a missing relative of the kind listed on the Charley Project. You don’t know where they are, if they’re hurt, if they have enough to eat, where they lay their heads at night, even if they’re alive at all. The people of Cyprus deserve this closure.

“Missing” fugitives

I saw the 1967 disappearance of William Leslie Arnold on the Nebraska State Patrol database. I don’t think I’ll put him on Charley, though. According to this Unsolved Mysteries post, he escaped from prison where he was serving time for the murder of his parents, a crime he committed when he was just 15 years old.

There are a few other people listed on missing persons sites who are actually fugitives believed to be on the run from the law. Heather Jean Johnson is wanted for attempted murder. Another man listed on NCMA, I forget his name, is wanted for hiding a camera in a girls’ locker room and filming the girls undressing. Whenever I find out about this sort of thing I remove the person from Charley. If they’re believed to have run to avoid prosecution, they’re not really missing, though their families may miss them.

Missing persons case prompts investigation into possible police racism

According to this article, a brain-damaged Asian refugee (identified in this article as Chinese dissident Yu Dongyue) wandered away from a relative’s home and was reported missing. Meanwhile, the police picked him up for public intoxication. He couldn’t tell them his name so they listed him as “Jackie Chan” on the intake papers.

Apparently some people think that is Seriously Not Funny. They even suggest that perhaps not calling him the usual “John Doe” hindered the search for him. That is, if his family checked the jail for an unidentified man (and it’s not clear that they did), they wouldn’t have been able to find him because he would be listed under a name but not his own name. (Dongyue was released without charge eighteen hours after his arrest and someone found him eight miles from the jail, recognized him from the missing persons fliers and took him home. He’d been missing about a day and a half.) So now there is a review at the police department and the chief is making a public apology and someone is going to get seriously yelled at and possibly fired.

Tasteless? Definitely. Insensitive? Definitely. I don’t know if the cop who did this was racist, but he certainly should have known better.

A roundup of resolves

It sometimes happens that I get several resolved cases dumped on me all at once. Today is one of those days. We’ve got:

Alice Louise Donovan, 44, who was kidnapped from Conway, South Carolina on November 14, 2002. Her abductors were too thoroughly frightening young punks, Brenden Basham and Chadwick Fulks, who’d broken out of jail and gone on a multi-state crime spree of robbery, car theft, burglary, kidnapping and murder. The suspects were arrested two days later. They were later convicted of carjacking resulting in death in Alice’s case. Bone fragments found in Horry County, South Carolina in January have just been identified as Alice’s. Basham and Fulks are both on death row now. Another of their victims, a West Virginia college student named Samantha Burns, is still among the missing.

Michael Ray Larsen, 49, a transient who disappeared from Fort Bragg, California in August 2003. His skeletal remains were found near a homeless encampment in Fort Bragg last week, and were identified this week. There was no indication of foul play. It looks like he might have fallen off a cliff.

Tiairra Jo Garcia, 19, disappeared from Pasco, Washington on June 22, 2008. Her dirtbag boyfriend and three of his associates were charged in connection with her disappearance. The police believe Tiairra’s boyfriend accidentally shot her and then let her die without trying to get help for her. Tiairra’s remains turned up in Mount Rainier National Park. The boyfriend was sentenced to eight years in prison and one of his friends got one year for their roles in her death. It hardly seems to be enough.

Brody Shaun Shelton, 3, and his sister Logan Willow Shelton, 1, were kidnapped by their mother from Las Vegas, Nevada on March 19, 2004. The children have been found safe, according to the NCMEC; I have no other details.