Another example of seeing them living

I have written several times about coming across traces of a missing person online from before they became missing. It’s an eerie feeling.

This popped up in one of the recent Virginia cases I added. I found a comment the missing man wrote on a blog post just a few months before his disappearance; he complained that his daughter had made false claims about him in court and gotten a restraining order against him for no reason.

Today I was grabbing random cases off of Charley to add to its Twitter feed — I’m stored up for the rest of the month, and even if I get run over by a bus the Tweets will go up automatically — and came across Alex Talosig, one of my “few details are available” cases. He’s on the CDOJ database but not NamUs and I’ve got nothing on his disappearance.

So I Googled him. And, although I still have nothing on his disappearance, I found out Alex seems to have attended Ohlone College in the spring of 2012, two and a half years before his November 2014 disappearance, and he’s quoted in their campus newspaper in an article about the school’s Health Fair. Ohlone College is a community college in Fremont, California, half an hour’s drive from Santa Clara, where my Alex Talosig disappeared from, so I’m reasonably sure the Alex Talsoig in the article is the same guy:

Student Alex Talosig enjoyed the abundant amount of information through handouts. “I did not know about the services but a lot does not pertain to me,” said Talosig.

He has been to the Ohlone College Health Center and used its services.

“They helped me get medication because I’m from a low income family,” said Talosig. “The health center does a lot to give help to students.”

I found a few Facebook profiles for people by that name and one of them looks like it could be my Alex. That profile hasn’t been updated since 2013, before my Alex disappeared. The only clear photo that’s publicly viewable looks a bit like my Alex, but I’m not sure; he’s wearing sunglasses in the picture and the angle isn’t great.

So what happened to you, Alex? Where have you been for the past 22 months? I hope you’re all right.

ET entry, William Taylor

Another Executed Today entry by me: William Robert Taylor, who was hanged on this day in Lancaster, England in 1862 after he murdered his three children and his landlord. The tragedy began in January of that year when the pipes at Taylor’s home burst and scalded his seven-year-old daughter to death. Taylor blamed his landlord for the accident, and the landlord refused to pay compensation and subsequently instituted eviction proceedings on the family.

The only survivor was Taylor’s wife, who was also charged, but acquitted. I wonder what became of the poor woman.

MP of the week: Damian Dill

This week’s featured missing person is Damian Kinte Dill, who disappeared from Montgomery, Alabama on February 15, 2005. It’s possible he joined a Job Corps program in Florida after his disappearance.

For the uninitiated, the Job Corps is a federal program run by the U.S. Department of Labor, which provides education and vocational training to low-income and/or at-risk people between 16 and 24 years old. Damian was 20.

It seems like it would be easy enough to tell whether he was in fact enrolled in it, so I don’t know if the Florida lead fizzled, or what. But he’s been missing for eleven and a half years and I can’t find any more information.