MP of the week: Derrick Tenorio

This week’s featured missing person (I am sorry it’s late, and sorry that I missed last week entirely with updates cause I was failing at life or something) is Derrick James Tenorio, a 21-year-old Native American (Navajo) man who disappeared from Steamboat, Arizona on August 5, 2011.

He is described as 5’7 and between 170 and 190 pounds, with dark brown hair and the word “KAOS” spelled across his left-hand knuckles. I’m assuming his eyes are dark too though the description didn’t say. He was last seen wearing pretty standard young man apparel: a red long-sleeved shirt, black pants, and tan steel-toed work boots.

Derrick was at Steamboat Standing Rock at close to midnight. (No, not the Steamboat Rock that’s in Washington State. I got those two mixed up at first.) He was walking to visit his girlfriend but never arrived. He left behind two toddler-age kids and his girlfriend was pregnant with a third.

It’s hard to tell from the limited info what might have happened, but looking at the images of the Steamboat Standing Rock area, it doesn’t look all that safe to walk in after dark. I wonder if there was an accident of some kind, perhaps a fall.

The #MMIW (missing and murdered indigenous women) hashtag has resulted in some decent traction as far as press/searches/laws passed regarding missing and murdered Native women, but Native men also disappear at higher rates than average and they too need attention. Because of Derrick’s disappearance, three kids are growing up without their father.

Sitting here pondering about minutae that’s of interest to no one

So what’s going on with Carole Louise Rodriguez‘s dress? This photo is said to have been taken just hours before her disappearance, but…

NamUs, which is the source of the photo, claims it’s a “purple mini dress with a print of Chinese pagodas and other Chinese decorations.” But I’ve had a good close-up look (and you can too, click on the photo above to make it larger) and the images on the dress look nothing like pagodas except for their shape. They appear, to me, to be images of snow-covered evergreen trees, snowflakes, reindeer and an all-around winter/Christmas theme, nothing Chinese.

But she disappeared in August. Why was she wearing a Christmas dress (assuming I’m correct and it was a Christmas dress)? And why, if it was indeed a Christmas dress, was it purple? It’s not a scandalous color choice but it is strange, given that most Christmas-themed clothes are red or green.

I think this has got to be either the wrong description or the wrong photo or both. But the dress is long since gone now, like Carol herself. I suppose no one really cares that much what the print on it was. No one except me.

Even modern day photos can be so difficult to figure out when you get into the small details. I put up a guy today who’s been missing only a year, and I found photos of him showing his tattoos, but they are all blurs to me except one.

MP of the week: Martha Mertz

This week’s featured missing person is Martha Alice Mertz, one of the Charley Project’s older cases: she was last seen on June 22, 1961 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Martha was 47 at the time and would be 108 today if still alive, which seems unlikely. She was between 5’0 and 5’2 and between 100 and 120 pounds, with brown hair and blue eyes, and was last seen wearing a white blouse and black pedal-pusher pants which are basically what they used to call capri pants. My mom (who was a child attending elementary school in 1961) says all the girls had to wear skirts and dresses to school, except for the very last day of classes, during which they were permitted to wear pedal-pushers.

So Martha left home after a heated argument with her husband, and was never seen again. She had left before after had arguments with him, but would always get in touch with someone in the family. This time she didn’t get in touch with anybody.

It’s hard to tell what happened here. Obviously the husband has to be looked at, but a neighbor who overheard their argument that didn’t night said it didn’t seem to be any worse than the others they’d had, and the witness saw and heard no indications of physical violence.

Martha had said before she she wanted to leave her husband and go somewhere else where no one would know, and perhaps she did. It was a lot easier to drop completely out of sight in 1961 than it is now. But if she did she voluntarily drop out of sight, she left everything behind, including thousands of dollars in the bank.

I doubt this case is solvable at this point. Very sad.

As for me: I put up a small update today and everything is resuming as usual. I took a longer break than I thought I would, being horribly tired. I just kind of crashed for awhile.

Finished!

So yesterday, after a fourteen-hour stretch at my desk, I finally finished the last letter’s worth of cases.

The vehicle change is now fully implemented! And I purged hundreds and hundreds of cases.

By this point I felt like a used dish rag. I staggered into the bedroom and then my husband and I went out for something to celebrate the conclusion of the vehicle change with.

When we came home I watched TV with my husband for a few hours, and then slept for like 18 hours.

Having rested, I no longer feel like a used dish rag, but I still feel pretty tired.

I figure I’ll resume updates on Friday or Saturday. Certainly there are a lot of them.

MP of the week: Sean Seebarran

This week’s featured missing person is Sean Yougeshwer Seebarran, who disappeared from West Palm Beach, Florida on New Years’ Eve, 2017. He lived in New York but was visiting family in Florida when he disappeared after arguing with one of the aforementioned family members. He didn’t know anyone else in the area besides his relatives, and he didn’t have a car with him.

It’s not clear what happened to him, but he had bought a seat on a plane back to New York for January 8 and never made his flight.

Sean was 33 when he was last seen, and he had an unspecified injury to his left arm and shoulder. He was born in Guyana and is of Asian descent (a lot of Guyanese people are descended from Indian immigrants), with black hair, brown eyes, and scars on his abdomen and chest. He is 5’8 tall and weighed 140 pounds. If still alive, Sean would be 38 today.

From his Facebook page, he seems like a normal and happy young man, though well I know that social media posts can be deceiving.

His last public post is dated Christmas Day, a week before his disappearance: he posted some selfies he’d taken with one of the kid actors from Stranger Things. Earlier that month he posted pics and a video clip from the Christmas Parade in Queens, New York City. (By the way, the “Queens College” he mentions is not Queens College, New York, but rather a school in Guyana that happened to have the same name.)

I hope he’s still alive and that he’ll be located soon.

As for me — I’m working on the very last letter of the website overhaul. As I mentioned in my last entry, after completion I plan to take a day or so off to chill out and have a drink or five. Then resume updates.

On the home stretch

So I’m 1/3rd of the way though the letter R and after that, I just have S and T left to do.

I have purged hundreds of cases as I go along. When I started this update/housecleaning, the Charley Project had a little more than 15,000 cases listed (I don’t remember the exact number). Now I’m down to 14,600-ish and am predicting I’ll remove at least 100 more before this is over.

After I finish R, S, and T, I am going to get drunk. After I recover from that, I’m going to start on the updates I’ve been neglecting for the past couple of weeks.

On the bright side, my kitten Viola has only had one potty accident in the past two or three weeks, and I *almost* trust her on the bed again.

Map dowsing, rewards and scammers

So once in awhile I’ll get emails from people who claim they have found, or think they have found, a missing person or some information on a missing persons case through paranormal means. Psychic impressions, talking to ghosts, and so on.

This post is not meant to spark a discussion on the various pros and cons of using paranormal means to find a missing person, or find anything at all. All such methods are just so much made-up nonsense. I am not here to debate this and please do not do so in the comments section.

One paranormal “search method” is something called map dowsing. You can read more about it at this link, but basically it involves studying a map of an area, pointing out a particular spot and claiming that whatever you’re looking for is in or near that spot. It’s no more accurate than any other person’s educated guess.

(Once I actually replied to a map dowser’s email politely telling him that map dowsing was hooey and not to waste his time. A few weeks later, to my astonishment, he wrote back saying upon further reflection. I had been right and he was sorry he’d bothered me. Shocking.)

Anyway, today I got an email from another map dowser who claims to have located a certain missing person. He says he will reveal the person’s location, but only in exchange for whatever reward money is being offered for the recovery of that person. (I don’t know what the reward is, I don’t talk about those in my case summaries.) He wanted me to connect him with the missing person’s family.

I have a strong urge to reply and very IMpolitely tell him where he can shove his psychic abilities and theories. Like, if he actually knows some long-term missing person’s location and he’s refusing to disclose if he gets paid? Disgusting. And he DOESN’T even actually know (though he may perhaps genuinely think he does) so he’s just trying to scam a vulnerable, desperate family.

Yeah.

So as far as my vehicle change/purge is going, I’m up to the letter N now. I plan to finish N tonight.