This list is of MPs who are believed to have drowned in lakes. There aren’t nearly so many people as those who disappeared from rivers and oceans, because lakes have (A) a confined space to search in and (B) little or nothing in the way of currents.
Yeah, so Michael and I are leaving to catch our flight to Poland in a little bit. Until we return home on June 5, I’ll only be semi-available at best. We’re not taking our smartphones because of security concerns (of both the “pickpocket” and “government snooping into our data” variety). I’m bringing my tablet though, and we will have wifi in the various places we’re staying in.
You guys be good while I’m gone and don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.
This week’s featured missing person is Jamie Jo Travis, a 27-year-old woman who disappeared from Peoria, Illinois on August 30, 2005. Unfortunately I don’t have any details on her disappearance. I checked her NamUs page hoping it would have new information, but all I could find was a note saying she may use the last name Wolgemuth.
If Jamie is still alive she would be 39 this year.
Yeah, so I’m back from Reynoldsburg, Ohio, where they held an event today to honor the missing children of Ohio. Although I showed up in an unofficial capacity only, I had a blast.
I mainly came cause Gina DeJesus, one of the Cleveland kidnap survivors, was speaking. The event was at the Messiah Lutheran Church. I showed up slightly late and had to sit in the back. There were several speakers before Gina, and I spent some time trying to figure out which one of the people sitting in the audience was her. It was fairly easy because half or more of the attendees were black, and most of the rest were white. I zeroed in on two brown-skinned women in the front but couldn’t figure out which one was Gina. They turned out to be Gina and her older sister Myra.
My view from the back of the church during the sisters’ speeches; Gina is on the right and Myra is on the left.
Anyway, Gina read a speech off several sheets of paper about how it was important to pay attention to missing persons bulletins, and it was important to pay attention to your surroundings and the people in your neighborhood and so on because you never knew who might be hiding something. I mean, people went inside Ariel Castro’s house and had no clue about the women held captive there. I think a lot of that is because the idea that your friend, neighbor or relative might have three kidnapped women locked in his basement is just something that would not occur to most people.
Myra spoke also, and talked about what life was like having a missing family member. One of the things she mentioned was how a man known to the family told her parents, reassuringly, something like “Don’t worry, they won’t find her dead.”
That man was named Ariel Castro.
There was an intermission before a middle school choir showed up to sing a song. I went around talking to people — not Gina, I was not sure whether to approach her or not at that point — and handing out business cards. There were booths about various topics set up in the lobby and an adorable remote-controlled talking boat that went around telling people about boat safety. I told the boat about the time I nearly drowned in Lake Michigan at age five, failing to mention the fact that this near-tragedy did not involve a boat, just some poorly supervised beach time.
Me and the talking robot boat.Gina (far right) with members of the anti human trafficking group Break Every Chain.
So after all that was over we had a balloon release in the parking lot. Fortunately the wind cooperated.
Just before the balloon release.Post balloon release. Each one has a missing child’s name attached.
Just before we all left, I decided to approach Gina after seeing some other people do so. We didn’t really talk but she consented to have her photo taken with me before we parted ways. I wish I had remembered to smile in the picture. It was one of those days where it was cloudy out (it rained later) but the light hurt your eyes anyway, and I was squinting so hard I forgot about smiling.
Gina DeJesus (right) and me.
And then I went home.
Altogether it was a most profitable visit. I made some contacts and hope to return next year.
Last spring-ish, on the advice of my dentist and about a million other people, I decided to stop drinking so much pop. I fell off the wagon in November, and I decided I’d better get back on before my trip to Poland, because I believe pop is both more expensive and hard to find there.
End result is I’ve been sleeping most of the day for the better part of a week.
I think I’m back on the wagon now, and I’ll update later today — much later, because in a little bit I’m taking off for Reynoldsburg, where they’re holding a missing persons event and Gina DeJesus is going to speak.
Three years and one day ago I did a Make-a-List Monday of MPs who had photos or drawings of their tattoos in the casefile. Well, here’s a second list of MPs who weren’t on the first list — ones that I forgot the first time, or have been added since then.
Gah, I have been neglecting my weekly features as of late and haven’t done a FF case since March. This one is Joyce Creola Brewer, a fifteen-year-old girl who disappeared from Grand Prairie, Texas on September 6, 1970.
The circumstances of Joyce’s disappearance — last seen stomping out of the house after a fight with her parents — might indicate she ran away. If so she’s been gone for a VERY long time, obviously — 46 years, almost 47 — but it’s by no means impossible that she’s still alive.
If she is not, or for that matter if she is, a good way to identify her would be the extensive burn scars on her torso and left arm.
If she’s still alive, Joyce would be 62 today, and maybe a grandmother or something.
Spent much of the night prying photographs loose from the Newspapers.com archives, for MP cases that have NamUs pages but no pictures. My efforts yielded… three pictures. That’s all. But three pictures means three casefiles for the Charley Project, and perhaps the photos I found will eventually migrate to NamUs, so there you go.
It’s really frustrating when I know a ton of information about a case but I can’t put it on Charley due to lack of a picture. NamUs, for instance, has the case of an HIV-positive infant who was abducted by her babysitter back in the 1980s. Plenty of details, interviews with her parents, name and description of the babysitter (whose identity is known), etc — but I have no photo of the baby. (And without her AZT drugs, that baby is almost certainly dead now.)
There was another case I found where a teenager was washed away in a flood, along with the busload of people of he was sitting in. His was the only body not recovered, and for years afterwards his parents persisted in the hope that he might still be alive. It’s a very sad story and again, there are plenty of details. In fact, Newspapers.com actually had a picture of this kid, but it was of such poor quality that even I, with myutterlyabysmalstandards, could not accept it. So disappointing!
The Charley Project Blog 