Article for Tristen Myers

I found an anniversary article for four-year-old Tristen Myers, who’s been missing from North Carolina ten years next week. (He disappeared on my birthday.) No clues as to what happened to him; he was just gone.

The article doesn’t provide any details on Tristen’s history but as I recorded on his Charley page, he went through a lot in his short life. His father is unknown; his mother, a fifteen-year-old exotic dancer, was killed in an accident six years ago. He was born in Mississippi, but he was sent to live with a great-aunt and great-uncle in North Carolina after his grandfather ran over him in a drunken accident. He apparently had some fairly severe psychiatric problems and was aggressive towards other children and to himself.

I really hope he found a good home somewhere. But I don’t think he is alive.

Townspeople form “chain of life” to find girl lost in cornfield

I found this article about how a whole town turned out to search for a little girl who’d gotten lost in a cornfield at night. They formed a human chain and searched, row by row, until they found her.

One of my brothers was also lost in a cornfield once. He was about fourteen years old. He went to a drinking party at Halloween, drank half a bottle of vodka, wandered off into a cornfield and passed out. It was really cold, freezing or below, and they thought he might freeze to death before they found him. But the sheriff’s department came out with bloodhounds and they found him with no harm done, except he got put on juvenile probation and had to go to alcohol education classes — “drunk school.” Part of the classes included parental involvement, so my dad went, and they asked him why my brother had drunk so much in one sitting like that. He reckoned that my brother just didn’t know how to drink, since neither of my parents drink or keep any alcohol at home, so he didn’t know you shouldn’t drink so much.