Eleven years ago today

Whilst writing updates for the case for Indira Montiero, I realized that today is eleven years to the day since she was last seen in Manhattan, New York. She was 22 years old at the time of her disappearance and seems to have been going places: she had a good job as an accounting clerk, she was enrolled in college studying accounting, and she was thinking of starting a business designing clothes for petite women. One problem, however: she was dating a dirt bag.

Indira’s boyfriend sounds like a real prince. He beat a man to death when he was fourteen and served two years for manslaughter. In his two-year relationship with Indira she filed eleven domestic violence complaints against him and he filed four against her. In spite of this they continued to live together and she repeatedly spent thousands of dollars bailing him out of jail after his numerous arrests — not all of which were related to her; he was also charged with attacking another woman who lived in his apartment complex. Oh, and a few days after Indira’s disappearance he took their one-year-old daughter and abandoned her at the babysitter’s house.

Needless to say, foul play is suspected in Indira’s disappearance.

Someone in the Bronx with the same name as Indira’s boyfriend, and the right age, was convicted of animal cruelty last fall for leaving his Maltese dog in a van while he went swimming. The temperatures outside reached 95 degrees that day and inside the vehicle they climbed to 140 degrees. The dog died, obviously. The guy actually got sentenced to some time in jail, which is unusual for animal cruelty charges. Usually people get off with a fine or probation. I think this is not closely enough connected to Indira’s disappearance to note it in her file, though. I’m not even 100% sure it’s the same guy, though it probably is.

I hope Indira’s daughter, who would now be 12, is being lovingly looked after, preferably by someone other than her father. I don’t think her mother’s coming back.

Whoops

This out of India: a married woman who had disappeared in 2008, whose husband was arrested for her murder, turned up alive and well. She’d run off with another guy, who subsequently abandoned her, so she returned to her parents’ home. Her husband, meanwhile, had been in jail for eight months. The article says she’d like to return to him but so far he’s refusing to take her. From the article:

[A]ction will be taken against those police personnel who arrested the husband without making proper enquiry.

Well, I certainly hope so.

Seven years ago today

As this article notes, it was seven years ago this day that 14-year-old Georgina DeJesus disappeared while walking home from school in Cleveland, Ohio. It seems to be a probable non-family abduction. There’s a chance that Gina may be still alive, as the police think she might have been forced into prostitution. Teen girls Amanda Berry and Ashley Summers also disappeared from Cleveland (Amanda in 2003, Ashley in 2007) and, last I heard, the cops thought the disappearances could be linked.

I know Gina was a special ed student and barely literate, but I’m not sure how far her level of disability went — whether she had poor intellectual functioning in general, or whether she had a normal IQ and just severe dyslexia, or what. I suppose she can’t have been too badly off, intellectually, since she walked to and from school by herself. Her casefile has a sketch of a possible suspect.

Theodore Wroblewski, missing 2 years, found dead in own house

79-year-old Theodore Wroblewski, who disappeared from Niagara Falls, New York back in February 2009, was found dead in his own basement on Thursday — crushed under a pile of his own stuff. It seems Wroblewski was a compulsive hoarder. Quote from the article:

Family members who had not seen him for several weeks reported Wroblewski missing on Feb. 12, 2009. City police searched his house that day, and twice more during the following month, but didn’t find him amid a stockpile of debris “from floor to ceiling, [in] the whole house,” said Capt. William M. Thomson, chief of detectives. “You can’t even adequately describe it.”

Wroblewski shared the house with his mother until she moved into a nursing home in 2008. The house was jammed with old newspapers and magazines, plastic bags, empty containers, cardboard boxes and scrap wood of all shapes and sizes, Thomson said.

Sounds like a serious fire hazard. From another article:

“Even as we were in there last night, it was difficult to reach the body,” Thomson said. “The basement was filled from the floor to ceiling with trash or treasures I guess they were to him. We would try to move things and other stuff would fall on us.”

Thomson said Wroblewski’s cousin had gained access to the Grand Avenue home last fall after estate proceedings. Since that time, he has been having the contents of the house hauled away by the truckload.

This is the second Charley Project case, and the third case profiled on my blog, where the MP was a compulsive hoarder and turned up on their own property, buried under a pile of their stuff. The other two were women, Billie Jean James and Eunice Burwell-Workman. Eunice was missing for six years, but Billie wasn’t missing long enough to be put on Charley.