Very sad article about runaways

The New York Times has done a very good article about teen runaways and why they run and why they stay away and how they survive. It’s really sad — especially the statistic on page 3 that 75% of runaways are never even reported missing, either because the parents don’t want them around or because they’re afraid to get the police involved.

I read an excellent book by Todd Strasser, Can’t Get There from Here, about a group of teen runaways and throwaways living on the streets of a major American city — New York, I think. They ranged in age from 12 to 22. They lived lives a lot like what’s described in the newspaper article.

I think maybe if a runaway is from a good home and they don’t come back, maybe it’s because they’re ashamed. They might not want to go home after having done things like sell drugs or sell themselves to survive. They might be afraid their parents will be mad at them and will reject them.

Runaway vs. non-family abduction

It often happens that a young girl chooses to run off with an older (usually of age) boyfriend. In most cases, when this occurs the NCMEC lists the girl as a runaway and says she “may be in the company of an adult male.” Not always, though. Some of these girls are classified as abducted, and I’m not sure why. It seems to be like a completely random thing.

I thought it might have to do with age. Not so: Janet/Janeth Munoz, who wasn’t even twelve and a half, is listed as abducted on the California DOJ database but as a runaway with the NCMEC. Nor do the authorities have had to issue a warrant for the girl’s boyfriend: there is apparently no arrest warrant out for Reyna Alvarado-Carrera’s boyfriend. Chioma Gray is listed as endangered missing, neither abducted nor a runaway, in spite of the fact that her boyfriend has a slew of warrants out for him connected to their flight. On the other hand, Diana Gonzalez, who is missing under very similar circumstances, is listed as a non-family abduction. What gives?

Go figure.

Rebecca Rathstone WTF?

According to the NCMEC poster, Rebecca Rathstone ran away on October 17, 2006, when she was twelve years old. According to the Santa Clarita Valley Nonprofit News Center, the date of disappearance is September 15, 2008, making her fourteen. The Cali DOJ also has her listed under the September 2008 date. Pretty huge discrepancy.

5′7 is very tall for a twelve-year-old, but it’s kind of tall for a woman, period. Rebecca doesn’t look twelve in the pictures, but it’s difficult to tell the ages of people, especially when they’re in adolescence and trying hard to look older.

I think a phone call is in order.

UPDATE: The September 2008 date of disappearance is correct. Rebecca’s brother ran in October 2006 and Jerry Nance reckons the person writing the poster got confused and put that as Rebecca’s date of disappearance as well. Her brother is still missing, but he’s turned 18 and is no longer on the NCMEC.

Article about Blake Pursley missing 15 years now

Blake Pursley has been missing 15 years, longer than he’d been alive before his disappearance. He is presumed dead — even if he didn’t meet with foul play, his medical conditions would have killed him without treatment. There’s an article about this in the San Bernardino Sun.

The article doesn’t directly cite the Charley Project, but I’m reasonably sure Charley was used as a source. I don’t know where else they would have gotten the info about the two other boys missing from the same school.

I’m not accusing anyone at the Cedu School of anything, of course, and one of the boys definitely did run away. But I think it’s very usual to have THREE long-term disappearances from one small school. Any school for troubled teens is going to have runaways, but two of these “runaways” have been missing more than 15 years, and even Daniel Yuen’s been missing for five. I wonder if anyone has investigated this.

Anybody else think this kid might have some medical condition?

Dean Worsley was fifteen years old at the time of his disappearance, looked about nine, and was only 4′11 and 70 pounds. That seems improbably tiny to me.

Human remains found at missing teen’s house

The police have found human remains at the house where fifteen-year-old Alycia Mesiti disappeared from in 2006. Her family no longer lives there. Alycia was listed as a runaway; she supposedly took some clothes and her dog. The article has photos of her which her Charley Project casefile hasn’t got.

There’s no identity to the remains yet, but this certainly doesn’t look good. It reminds me a bit of the Karen Kamsch case. I would say I hope the body is NOT Alycia, but if it isn’t her then it must be someone else. Either way, some person has been murdered and their loved ones will suffer.

Voluntary missing adult

A lot of people on missing persons databases such as the California Department of Justice one are listed as “voluntary missing adult.” I’m not sure how accurate this is in a lot of cases, as it seems to be the default classification for any adult that goes missing and doesn’t have any serious medical conditions or any obvious signs of foul play. But I know many adults do go missing voluntarily. Or some of them just leave and aren’t aware that anyone is looking for them. Today I’d like to write about the “classic” cases—like the ones where someone goes out for a jug of milk, takes a taxi to the airport instead, hops on a plane to Phoenix and starts a new life with nary a word to anyone. It’s much harder to do that than it used to be, but it still happens.

I would consider this kind of disappearance to be a symbolic form of suicide. The two actions have a lot in common. Both the MP and the suicide are basically trying to obliterate themselves and their identity. They both seek to escape a life that, for whatever reason, has become unbearable to them. In both cases (I believe) mental illness and/or drug abuse is often a factor. And both dropping out of sight permanently and killing yourself are abominably selfish things to do, and leave your family and friends torn at the seams and feeling confused and guilty for the rest of their lives. Nevertheless, I do feel some sympathy for most adults who choose to go missing, as I do for suicides.

I figure your life has to be REALLY bad before you are willing to simply drop off the face of the planet. Even if it appears good on the surface, there’s a lot of things that aren’t obvious to anyone other than yourself. Who knows what lurks inside a person’s head?

To give an example: a young man named Matthew Wilson, a native of Oklahoma, vanished without a trace from Houston, Texas in December 2007. He was a full-ride student at Rice University, one of the most prestigious schools in the nation. He was brilliant and hardworking. He got straight A’s at Rice, something that’s very difficult to do—a C really is a typical grade there, unlike most other colleges that practice grade inflation. He seemed destined for a glittering future in his chosen career, computer science. He also had a very loving, stable family. His father had died when he was very young, but he had two older sisters and a mother who adored him.

And then he was suddenly gone. He vanished during final exams week and never completed his coursework for two classes. His car disappeared with him, but almost nothing else did. He left quite a bit of money behind in his bank account, over a thousand dollars I think. For a missing adult man, there was quite a lot of press about him, because his life seemed so stable. He looked like the last person you would believe would run away.

But run away is what he’d done. Matthew was located eight months later in Berkeley, California, at the University of California campus. He was first arrested on a minor charge (I think he had a laptop with the serial number filed off) that was later dropped. Then he was committed to a mental hospital, as the police suspected he might be a danger to himself.

His mother was reunited with her son and later gave an interview with the press. She said she found out that Matthew had been deeply unhappy at Rice for a very long time. She didn’t say why, but I can guess—the pressure. Being a prodigy, an overachiever, is very hard to be, something I know firsthand. Everyone expects you to be brilliant all the time, perfect at everything, and you’re terrified that if you actually screw up at something (like every human being does once in awhile), everybody will be terribly disappointed and disillusioned with you. My guess, also, is that Matthew suffered from depression. He was apparently suicidal when the cops found him, after all. Having to keep up a rate of 100% success while being bogged down with depression…no wonder he burned out. No one had had any idea how he felt, and he was afraid to tell anyone.

It came out that Matthew had been living homeless in the Berkeley area since he went missing. For awhile he lived out of his car, then at homeless shelters and on the streets. He said he hardly had contact with anyone the entire time and certainly didn’t form any relationships. What a dismal and miserable time he had: sleeping in the bushes, scrounging for food. But he didn’t come back, he didn’t contact anyone. I think I remember that he even initially gave the police a false name when they found him. Whatever he was running from was apparently worse than living impoverished, anonymous, roofless, alone and far from home. He’d heard about himself in the news and knew people were worried about him and looking for him, but even that didn’t make him reveal himself. I hope he’s feeling better now. Last word is, he went home to Mom and they were going to try to work things out. Hopefully this included lots of therapy. Mom said he probably wouldn’t be coming back to Rice.

Obviously, I feel a lot of compassion for Matthew. But that isn’t to say I agree with what he did. He wasted thousands of dollars in resources from the police and other people trying to find him. He caused horrific pain to those who knew and loved him. If I were one of Matthew’s friends or a member of his family, I would be pretty angry with him.

I firmly believe that walking away from your life without a trace, permanently, is one of the most selfish things a person can do. On some level, it’s even more selfish than suicide. With suicide, at least your family and friends have a body to bury, and they can go and visit your gravesite, and they know what happened to you and can, maybe, come to peace with it. But when a loved one is just missing, that’s a wound that never heals. For the rest of their lives they will have to wonder what happened to you. Many times I’ve heard from the parents of missing children that it would have been easier if their child had died.

But I think when an adult runs away, you shouldn’t necessarily just assume the person is simply irresponsible and doesn’t care about those who love them. There’s probably a lot else going on that no one else will ever know.

What are the chances?

I found additional information about John Christopher Inman on the NamUs site (which is not as useless as I thought at first; I regret having judged it prematurely). It says he was attending a “school for the emotionally handicapped” when he disappeared. That’s got to be the Cedu School; I know of no other such school in the vicinity of Running Springs, California. (Paris Hilton attended the Cedu School for about five minutes back in 1994-ish.) Knowing the town he disappeared from, I wondered if he’d been a student at Cedu; now I know for sure.

This makes three—count ‘em, three!—teen boys I have on Charley who are missing from that school. The other two are Daniel Yuen and Blake Pursley. All three have been missing for a considerable time, much much longer than the average runaway: Daniel for five years now, Blake for almost fifteen years and John for sixteen years. What are the chances?

*rant* Let me say I am extremely skeptical of the worth of private residential schools for “problem teens.” I’m sure that not all of them are bad, and in that many of cases they can be beneficial. However, these are for-profit institutions that charge upwards of thousands of dollars a month in tuition. (I checked out a website for one of them just now and they charge $6,650 a month. Average length of stay is 16 to 18 months, which is $106,400 to $119,700. That could put a person through four years at a decent private college, or get two bachelor’s degrees at a state school. The tuition at these places is almost always not covered by health insurance plans, btw.) Thus, it’s in the schools’ interest to take as many students as possible.

Therapeutic boarding schools often issue alarmist literature to potential customers, listing behaviors of so-called “problem teens” and acting like the person’s teen child is going to kill someone or commit suicide or wind up in prison or become a crack ho or something unless the parent sends the kid to the school right away. Even such minor misbehavior as leaving dirty dishes out or refusing to clean his room have been given as reasons why the teen might need residential treatment! In addition to that, many of these schools are not run or staffed by professional counselors and therapists, and their methods of helping the children are distinctly unhelpful at best and often very harmful. Children have been basically murdered at some of those places, by beating, being denied food and water and medical care, and so on. For more on this topic I refer you to the excellent book Help At Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids. Or just Google the term “gulag school.”

Residential treatment should always be the method of last resort when dealing with a problem child. The idea is to use the least restrictive form of treatment that is effective; if the kid can get better at home, than they should stay at home. I myself would have been a prime candidate for one of those residential boarding schools if my parents had had the money and the inclination. I practically flunked out of junior high and dropped out of school altogether in the eighth grade. I had no friends. I spent an entire year basically hiding in my room and hardly ever leaving the house. I tried to commit suicide. I went on to date a man over a decade older than myself (and we’re still together after seven years, he’s the light of my life, but many people would consider that a “problem behavior” in a sixteen-year-old). I’ve had severe depression for most of my life. Yet I’ve turned out more or less all right. I still struggle with depression, but I graduated high school and went to a good college. I’m not homeless, I’m not a drug addict or an alcoholic or a prostitute, I have no prison record and I’ve never killed anybody. I got through a very difficult adolescence without much in the way of professional help. I think many problem teens will, like me, simply outgrow their problems if they hang on. *end of rant*

Getting back to the Cedu School: it closed in 2005 due to financial insolvency, in part due to the lawsuits filed against them by parents of children who attended the school and were allegedly mistreated. Daniel Yuen’s parents were among the plaintiffs. It’s worth noting that the school as many defenders, both the parents of alumni and former students who say it was very helpful to them. And perhaps it was.

But THREE BOYS have been missing from there for a long, long time. And Blake Pursley had so many health problems that he couldn’t have lasted a week on his own. What are the chances, I ask you. What’s going on here?

Spotlight Case: Deniese Hiraman

Christmas, I’m told, is a very difficult time for the families of missing people. I can sort of relate. One of my brothers was killed in a car accident twenty years ago and I’m sure he’s on my parents’ minds every Christmastime. But at least they know where my brother is, at least they can visit his grave. I can’t imagine how terrible it would be to try to celebrate Christmas while wondering if your child/spouse/sibling/friend is alive or dead or hurt or scared or can’t remember who they are.

Today I thought I’d spotlight the disappearance of Deniese Hiraman, who disappeared from New York City nearly a decade ago. I’ve always had a special interest in her case, probably because she’s exactly one day younger than me. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children had her listed as a runaway for years, but they’ve since changed the classification to endangered missing. Endangered missing is a catchall term and I’m not sure the changed classification actually means anything in Deniese’s case — the NCMEC appears to change most runaways to endangered missing once they reach a certain age.

At any rate, Deniese was only thirteen years old when she left to go to school and never arrived. Though I don’t have a lot of info on her disappearance, there are indications that her life was troubled. She reportedly was involved in a gang, and she had a fake ID giving her age as 18. She may be very far from home; there have been reported sightings of her in Minnesota, Canada and Trinidad. My intuition is that she’s alive and may not even know she’s listed as missing. I’m reminded of another runaway case, a young woman named Michelle Branch who disappeared in I think 1997. If I’m remembering the story right, about ten years later she called home after she got her own missing persons notice in the mail on an ADVO card. She said she’d been a “wild kid” and hadn’t realized people were looking for her.

But even if Deniese is alive, that doesn’t mean she’s well or in a good situation. Young, pretty girls like her, who think they know more about the world than they do — and I sure thought I knew everything when I was thirteen — are vulnerable for all kinds of predators. I only hope she’s safe and perhaps, this coming year, she’ll decide to call home and her family won’t have to spend another Christmas without her.