“An Uncertain Future for a Key Missing Persons Program” and other stories

Another article dump (I’ve decided to make a regular thing of this, even after I’m out of Facebook Jail):

This article about the near-defunding of NamUs. Key highlight: “Meanwhile, according to a statement from NIJ, the program could be facing staffing and service cuts, at least in the short-term — and it remains unclear what exactly the longer-term future of NamUs may be.”

From Alaska: four Native people disappeared this fall after visiting the city of Fairbanks, and they are all still missing. Their names are Willis Derendorf, Frank Minano, Debbie Nictune and Doren Sanford. Police don’t think the cases are related.

From Florida: Ashley Lucas disappeared in September, a few months after traveling from her home in Texas to the Florida Panhandle for work. She was hospitalized and has not been seen since her release at the end of the month.

From Massachusetts: it’s coming up on the sixth anniversary of the disappearance of Sabrina Lee Hatheway from Worcester.

From Mississippi: they’ve installed Crime Stoppers kiosks in Walmarts in Biloxi, Gulfport and Pascagoula to help find missing people from the area.

From Nevada: A body found in 2004 has been identified as Aldo Araiza, who disappeared in 2000 at the age of 20.

From North Carolina: the police are still looking for two people missing from Shelby: Kenneth Jamison, missing since 2017, and Walter Vernon McCraw, missing since 2018.

From Ohio: Brian Rini, who surfaced in Cincinnati in April 2019 and falsely claimed he was Timmothy James Pitzen, who disappeared from Wisconsin in 2011, has been sentenced to two years in prison for identity theft as a result. But because he gets credit for 20 months of time served, he’ll be out in four months. A year of probation follows his release.

Also from Ohio: the police are still looking for Jeffrey Hayes Pottinger, who disappeared on Christmas Eve in 2009 from Warren County.

From Texas: the police are still looking for Orville Seaton, who disappeared from Navasota two days before Christmas in 1997. He was 71 at the time and would be 94 today.

From Virginia: Ronald Roldan, recently charged with the kidnapping of Bethany Anne Decker, has now been charged with her murder as well. Bethany has been missing since 2011.

From Wyoming: Angela Laderlich disappeared from Casper on September 25 and is still missing.

From England: they found some human bones in Solihull, which were thought to possibly be those of thirteen-year-old David Spencer and eleven-year-old Patrick Warren, who disappeared the day after Christmas in 1996. However, it turns out the bones are over a century old.

From Nigeria: in an all-too-familiar story, the terrorist group Boko Haram has kidnapped more than 330 boys from a government-run boarding school in Kankara.

From Pakistan: despite promises to end the practice, security forces are still regularly abducting, torturing and murdering people. Thousands of victims are still missing.

From Scotland: A review of missing people from Glasgow.

So, this has happened with NamUs

The following message has been circulating:

Due to funding limitations and significant program modifications directed by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), beginning January 1, 2021, the UNT Center for Human Identification (UNTCHI) management and operation of the National Missing and Unidentified Person System (NamUs) will cease. UNTCHI will no longer be able to support NamUs stakeholders with any analytical or case support; victim services; system development; or new forensic services. The forensic services include: DNA typing (currently suspended), fingerprint examination, forensic odontology, and forensic anthropology (currently suspended). Effective immediately, NamUs will also be unable to support states that have passed legislation mandating the use of NamUs, including bulk data import needs.

UNTCHI at the University of North Texas Health Science Center has been proud to manage NamUs through a cooperative agreement with NIJ since October 1, 2011. However, despite our best efforts over the past several months to reach a sustainable solution, the sweeping program changes being mandated by NIJ at this time make it untenable for UNTCHI to continue management of NamUs.

We deeply regret the negative impact this situation will have on the thousands of NamUs criminal justice and public customers and stakeholders across the country. NamUs is the only program of its kind in existence, and we hope the program can continue its important work for agencies and families nationwide.

We will provide more information as it becomes available.

My interpretation of the message is that while the NamUs missing and unidentified persons database will still exist, its activities, in terms of solving cases by doing DNA matches etc., will be greatly curtailed starting the first day of 2021. This is only my interpretation, though, and I don’t know anything more than what’s in the message above, so don’t just assume I’m right and don’t ask me anything.

[UPDATE: The University of North Texas Center for Human Identification has issued a statement as well.]

Obviously this is a crushing blow for families of the missing and those who are trying to solve missing and unidentified persons cases all over the country. All I can do is suggest we all contact our elected representatives in Congress and beg them to do something to save this valuable program.

(Sorry I’ve been MIA for the past several days. The wifi at my house kicked it on Tuesday night and only just got restored. I could use data on my cell phone but not my computer. Also I am still in Facebook jail so I can’t post about this NamUs issue on the Charley Project Facebook page.)

I wonder if anyone at NamUs would fix this

I can’t do it, but it would be really great, and make NamUs more user-friendly, if people would round up all the cases from each city (say, San Francisco, California) and make sure they’re listed under the city of San Francisco, California and nowhere else.

I decided, on a whim, to do San Francisco cases today. And this is what happens when I try to type “San Francisco” into the appropriate slot in the form:

I’m having to check all those misspelled ones and the ones in all capital letters or no capital letters see if there’s anyone listed under there. Sometimes there is, but sometimes there isn’t.

They really all ought to be listed under just “San Francisco” and nowhere else. I’m just sayin’. And other cities have the same problem. Here’s two other examples:

Boy, I am tired of doing other people’s jobs

It’s got to the point where, when I start looking at the people on NamUs who went missing just over a year ago and can now be added to Charley, or at the runaways listed on the NCMEC (most of which are missing two years before I add them to Charley), I am initially unsure whether these people are REALLY missing or not. I would estimate 10% of the time or sometimes more, those people were found long ago and have just not been removed from the databases. A simple Google search will reveal that these people are not missing.

Given how well-funded and famous both NamUs and the NCMEC are, this is really inexcusable. I should not have to be checking on this; they should be at least reliable enough that the people they say as missing are, in fact, missing. I have written before about the real-life consequences this could lead to for the no-longer-missing person.

Honestly I don’t think it’s appropriate for NamUs to have people added that only disappeared a couple of days ago. It’s very unlikely that the NamUs database can assist in cases as recent as that, and very likely that the person will turn up one way or another, and often when that happens, for whatever reason they don’t get taken off NamUs and a year or more later they’re still on there.

I don’t know why it happens, whether it’s lack of money, lack of staff, some kind of bureaucratic tangle, just plain laziness, or what. I don’t know that much about the inner workings of NamUs or the NCMEC. I just know that this is completely unacceptable and a waste of everyone’s time and effort.

There’s nothing I can do about it, I suppose, and NamUs and the NCMEC definitely don’t listen to me, seeing as how I’ve been complaining about this issue for months. Just wanted to vent. Again.

NamUs question

Has anyone gotten any emails at all about updates to NamUs cases they’ve tracked since the database got redesigned back in June? Because I haven’t.

Um…wut

Per the NamUs case for James Charles Stanford, “James had told family members before he went missing that he wanted to move to Texas or California to join a convent.”

But James is male. And not even a little child, a teenager. I’m pretty sure they don’t let teenage boys join convents. That has got to be frowned upon at the very least.

Do they mean a monastery maybe?

*Headdesk right through the desk to the floor*

So I wrote up a runaway case off the NCMEC. Her name is Breanna. After I wrote up the basics from her poster, I was doing more research on the case for details to add to her casefile. She wasn’t in NamUs. I soon discovered why: an article saying she was found safe in August 2016.

I called the NCMEC about this and yup, she was found safe almost two years ago. But she’s still on their website. This is like the sixth time this has happened.

NamUs did have another Breanna listed, a young woman, so I decided to post that case instead. And the same thing happened: I wrote up the case with the NamUs details, then on further research discovered this Breanna had been found murdered in January 2017, only a few months after she disappeared. And she is still on NamUs.

I am seriously fed up.

The new NamUs

So NamUs 2.0 has been launched and I have to say, I personally like the improvements a lot. It’s nice to have everything on one page, for example, instead of having to keep clicking through multiple sections. You can search for more than one state at a time.

Best of all, you can now follow more than 50 cases! I’ve spent the last day or so going through cases just following them. It’s going to take awhile obviously. But being able to follow more cases is just great for me.

Not on Namus, Part V

1. Michelle Evette Albert
2. Maria Dolores Alcorn
3. Roger A. Anderson
4. Japhia Baker
5. Michael Henley Ballard
6. Faizah Amatullah Bashir
7. Nicholas Ryan Beck
8. Dustin Lynn Bird
9. Kimberly Diane Blanton
10. Kristin Blass
11. Monte Howard Bolton
12. Sandy Loyd Bond
13. Bryan Michael Brawner
14. Stephen Phillip Brumley Jr.
15. Ollie Letrell Cader
16. David Allen Carver
17. Jay Cee
18. Ronald Chapman
19. Tiffany Chavez
20. Di H. Chi
21. Antionette Renee Childress
22. Charles Don Claunch
23. Jeraldine Clemon
24. Kathy Lynn Cook
25. Lonnie McArthur Davis Jr.
26. Daren Dixon
27. Mary Douglas
28. Lisa Marie Duran
29. Jesse Allen Galloway
30. Steve Garcia
31. Sylvia Maria Gaxiola
32. Christopher Landon Glass
33. Kasandra Gonzalez
34. Herschel Frederick Gray
35. Herasmo Guillen
36. Fletcher Gull
37. Kathleen Ann Haney
38. Treyozie Charles Hardman
39. Sydil E. Harris
40. Douglas Bruce Hayes
41. Jose Benjamin Hernandez
42. Tomas Herrera
43. Steven Lee Hixson
44. Christopher Hooks
45. Luke Horde
46. Kenneth Hudson
47. William James Hummelsund
48. Beth M. Johnson
49. Joseph Phillenger Jones
50. Kevin Michael Kelly
51. Joe David Key
52. Mei Ying Lau
53. Keira Patrice Lawrence
54. Anthony Tyrone Lee
55. Areniz Del Carmen Lopez
56. Julian Zesati Lopez
57. Charles Jay Makey Jr.
58. Ramiro Martinez
59. Ramiro Ortiz Martinez
60. John Matsui
61. Keisha Nicole Smith Mays
62. Michael Joseph McKay
63. Rowdy James McMillian
64. Leslie Gale Mears
65. Billie Junior Meyer
66. John Edward Morgan
67. Rebecca Sue Morris
68. Sheila Ann Morton
69. Louis Carl Muller
70. Diana Marie Murrell
71. James Dennis Odell
72. Daniel Michael O’Leary
73. Yoseli Ortiz
74. Ariana Yvette Osorio
75. Marlene Palabichiny
76. Alyssa Parker
77. Kassaundra Denise Williams Patterson
78. Moesha Pierce
79. Tracie Dawn Phair
80. Laura Pinon
81. Gerald Lee Pollard Jr.
82. Xochilt Ann Prado
83. Lois Lee Robinson
84. Steven David Rockstad
85. Toni Rae Sanders
86. Nathan David Schlatter
87. Terri Lea Schlatter
88. Robert Lee Sellers
89. Colleen Jean Sharp
90. Michael Douglas Shaver
91. James Neil Shepard Jr.
92. Laurel Leigh Silver-Valker
93. Linda Mae Singh
94. Marcus Smile
95. Sailey Bannah Smith
96. Veronica Hahn Smith
97. Kevin Jay Stamp
98. Jennifer Sterling
99. Gilbert Ray Stewart
100. Kelly Ann Stigar
101. Robert Austin Tharp
102. Wilfredo Torres
103. Gilberto Milan Valdez
104. Delecia Annette Waddy
105. Sarah Elizabeth Watson
106. Tyler Alan Welling
107. Tiffany Susan Westford
108. Jameson Willis-Carroll
109. Dale Dion Wilson
110. Linda Wu

Ooh, this is a problem

So I just added the case of Charles Edward Tear, missing from Fargo, North Dakota, to Charley. And there’s an issue. Namely this:

Tear’s NamUs profile gives the date of disappearance as June 29, 2011. But this article has it as June 29, 2001.

One or the other of them is clearly wrong, but I’m damned if I know which. The difference is simply the slip of a finger, a typo. Oh, and ten full years.

I’m going with what NamUs says for now, but I wish I was more certain that was accurate. NamUs isn’t always correct. (Case in point: Tejin Thomas is still listed as a girl on there.)