Syllania Edwards found deceased

I just got a recovery notice from the NCMEC saying Syllania Terene Edwards has been found dead. I knew nothing about it so I Googled it and found this article. She is the eighth mesa victim! This is very odd. All the other victims thus far have been white or Hispanic local prostitutes in their twenties or thirties. Syllania was black and a runaway from Lawton, Oklahoma. She was fifteen years old when she disappeared in August 2003. The article says she was in foster care and hadn’t seen her mother since she was five.

That’s eight down, three to go.

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.