As I noted, the twentieth anniversary of Michael Dunahee‘s disappearance. Well, in honor of that, a Canadian news site has run an article about Michael and several other missing children from Canada.
The other kids mentioned are Tania Murrell (age 6, missing from Alberta since 1983), Courtney Struble (age 13, missing from Saskatchewan since 2004), and Mariam Makhniashvili (age 17, missing from Ontario since 2009).
I wish I could profile Canadian cases on Charley. But I really don’t have the time. Mariam’s case seems quite intriguing, from the headlines I’ve seen about it. She was a recent immigrant from the nation of Georgia (home of Joseph Stalin, born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, gotta love those Georgian names) and I don’t think she spoke English well. She was also supposed to be really shy, hadn’t made any friends yet in Canada and wasn’t the type to run away. I wonder if human traffickers got her.
The Charley Project Blog 
I live in Canada….
regarding MARIAM MAKHNIASHVILI, my opinion is that she may have run away. Her brother ran away not long after her disappearance, and her father was charged with attempted murder after stabbing two people. It sounds like a terribly troubled and violent home, so it’s not unlikely that Mariam ran away. She probably pretended she was going to school and then took off.
Yeah, I remember hearing about the family troubles.
If Mariam did run away, I hesitate to think of what became of her. All alone in a strange county, unable to speak the language.
Do you suppose she could of kept in touch with her brother and they arranged to get together? Maybe were able to go back to Georgia? B/c kids have pulled that off sometimes, got on a plane and just left. Kids younger than that even.
I don’t know why they’d want to go back to Georgia. The place is, to put it kindly, a shithole.
But it was their home. You should never assume that even if a country has a lot of problems that everybody that lives there is miserable and wants to leave and go live someplace else.
You are correct; according to a memoir I read by an American person who lived in Georgia for several years, most Georgians are intensely proud of being Georgian and think their country is the best in the world.
She also said Georgia is quite a wild place where people tend to settle things with their fists, or more. Once two acquaintances of hers got in a fight and one shot the other and the victim almost died and she asked, is anyone going to call the police? And everyone was like, no, why would we do that? They were genuinely puzzled by her suggestion.
It’s strange………but sometimes I feel like I know these people…….do you ever feel like that? by reading their stories so much. How/why do we remember so much about the missing?
I think that it’s very likelythat Mr Machivilli could bedepressed because Myriamjust disappeared. Otherwise why would hedo such a terrible thing to the people who were trying to help hisfamil find Myriam?
I was actually reading about this yesterday — human trafficking in the west is actually incredibly rare, much like stranger abduction. (And most human trafficking victims are people who, say, signed up to be nannies and were then forced to be prostitutes, not literally grabbed off the streets.) Shocked me to hear, but moral panics tend to be like that. (Here’s an article, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/22/AR2007092201401.html, and there’s a whole series at the Village Voice.)f
It’s more likely that Mariam was a victim of random crime or fled back to Georgia.
I was thinking more human trafficking in the terms of those pimps who prey on young girls, convince them to run away and then force them into prostitution. THOSE are depressingly common.
Or the ones that prey on girls that run away by finding them and promising them a place to stay, and later force them into prostitiution. That’s also common.
All three cases sound like stranger abductions/random crimes to me.
Ilya I will tell you in the case of Courtney I am her aunt and recently her case has been changed from a missing persons case to a homicide and I do not think that there was any stranger involved. It amazes me in dealing with this for almost 7 years that people assume that they know the people involved however do not. Why would Miriam and her brother not just let someone know they were leaving, they are adults which in this country allows them the right to go whereever they want. How are they managing without money or their personal information? It is very difficult for a person to go one day without using money or coming in contact with someone imagine doing it for this amount of time.
Thank you for a reply, but I didn’t assume anything – it was just a random thought derived from all the circumstances surrounding the case.
I certainly don’t mean to say that I know more about those things than anybody else…
Thank you for a reply, but I didn’t assume anything – it was just a random thought derived from all the circumstances surrounding the case.
With all do respect that is exactly what I am talking about the people closest to these cases do not even know the circumstances surrounding these cases or we would know where our loved ones are.