Damion Davis gets the max for rape

Damion Davis has been sentenced to one-and-a-third to four years in prison for third-degree rape of Qua’mere Rogers‘s mother. (That’s the same sentence he got for attacking another woman with a metal pick in an unrelated case; he’s doing time for that right now. The rape sentence will be consecutive to the assault sentence.) Qua’mere’s mom was sixteen years old when she had him. For a long time Davis was presumed to be the child’s father, but it turns out he wasn’t. In any case, Qua’mere’s mother went back to her family and left Qua’mere in Davis’s so-called “care” the year after his birth.

I’ve written about this case several times before; it’s similar to the more recent case of Dwight Stallings. Davis is the prime suspect in Qua’mere’s disappearance, which wasn’t even reported until July 2009, over half a year after he was last seen. He’s told different contradictory stories to explain what happened to Qua’mere, and he’s a pathological liar with many alias names and a long history of extreme violence. In 2008, he stabbed his former roommate in the neck, supposedly because the man had been asking questions about where Qua’mere was. (Davis got seven years in prison for that, another sentence he’s serving at present.)

You can see a film of Davis talking about aliens and conspiracies at his sentencing here. He’s been feigning insanity for the past few months, trying to escape responsibility for his crimes, but the shrinks have called him on it numerous times. He actually missed his entire rape trial because of this, according to this article:

After growling loudly and screaming in the courtroom, Davis was ordered removed from court by Judge Anthony Aloi. The judge decided the trial would go on without Davis in court because Davis had given up his right to be present by his disruptive conduct.

The police have said they think Qua’mere was killed and they may prosecute Davis for murder eventually. They’re still investigating, and biding their time. It’s not like Davis is going to go anywhere.

That poor boy. It seems no one ever loved him in his poor, brutish and short life.

Three more MP articles

There’s an article about Marlena Childress, a four-year-old girl who disappeared from Tennessee 25 years ago today. As far as I know her mother, Pamela Bailey, remains the prime suspect in her case. Bailey actually confessed to killing Marlena accidentally and was charged with murder, but the charge was dropped for lack of evidence. In 2002, she stabbed her twelve-year-old son. He survived and she was convicted of attempted murder. (According to this article, she’s out of prison now.) The article doesn’t really have much information, and nothing new, but the NCMEC just put out a new AP for Marlena.

At 4:30 today in Dallas, Texas, they’ll be screening a documentary called The Imposter, about the guy who passed himself off as Nicholas Barclay, a missing boy from Texas, for five months. (There’s also a film that tells a fictionalized account of the story, called The Chameleon.) The fact that Nicholas’s family believed this person is an indication of the power of wishful thinking: he was 23, had dark brown hair and brown eyes, and a French accent, and he refused to voluntarily give his fingerprints. The real Nicholas would have been 17 at the time, and had light brown hair and blue eyes. The FBI finally got a court order to take the individual’s fingerprints, which established his true identity: he was actually a French citizen named Frédéric Pierre Bourdin. He has a history of using aliases and pretending to be other people; in fact, Nicholas is one of three missing boys whose identity Bourdin assumed. Perhaps he’s mentally ill or just a person with a pathological need for attention. In any case, he presumably caused terrible anguish for the Barclay family. Nicholas is still missing after almost eighteen years. He would be 31 today.

There have been several articles lately about Elizabeth Ann Gill, most recently this one from yesterday. Missing from her Missouri home since 1965, when she was only two, she’s one of the Charley Project’s oldest cases. The theory they’re working on now is that she was abducted by “gypsies” who were in the area at the time, and possibly given or sold to someone who wanted to raise a child. There’s a good chance that she’s alive today, and given her age at the time, it’s highly unlikely she would remember anything of her former life.

Searching for the sick and disabled

Found this interesting Poughkeepsie Journal article about the difficulties when it comes to looking for people who are sick and/or disabled, particularly adults with dementia. A major portion of Charley’s MPs are elderly people with memory loss, or adults with severe mental illness like schizophrenia.

The article highlights the case of a woman who went missing and turned up at a local shelter, disoriented and unable to remember who she was or where she was from. She was kept at a hospital for six weeks before someone identified her. This can happen “when information on missing and unidentified persons, specifically those with mental health issues, is not shared among health-care providers and law enforcement.”

I think it’s gotten a bit worse since the passage of the HIPAA act, the medical privacy act, several years ago. (The Poughkeepsie Journal article also talks about HIPAA.) If I recall correctly, there was an article I read about Rachel Rice, a woman with schizophrenia who disappeared seven years ago this month, that said she frequently wound run away from hospitals and other care settings. The staff would then notify her daughter, who would help look for her and know that she might show up at her house. But since the HIPAA law was passed, the hospital staff etc. were unable to tell Rachel’s daughter whenever she disappeared. My mother, who works in the health care field, has criticized the law on several occasions, saying it does more harm than good. I don’t know enough about it to have an opinion on the matter, though I in my own personal experience heath care workers tend not to strictly observe the law.

Charges are about to filed in the Wallace Guidroz case

I just found this article about the disappearance of two-year-old Wallace Guidroz from a Tacoma, Washington park in 1983. His father, Stanley, said he’d been abducted. Wallace’s parents split up in 1985. His mother died, and the police lost track of Stanley until last year, when he stabbed his second wife to death in Louisiana.

Well, the article says that after Stanley’s trial for second-degree murder in Louisiana is over, he will return to Washington to answer to his suspected murder of little Wallace (he allegedly confessed to killing him). However, charges against him have NOT been filed in that case. I suppose there’s no particular hurry; Stanley will almost certainly be convicted in his wife Pepettra’s murder, and the sentence for that is life in prison. But the article left me a little confused, them saying Stanley would return to Washington like this was a fact, when in fact charges haven’t been filed yet and until they are, he isn’t going anywhere.