The internet is back up, finally. I’m not sure what was going on with it.
The NCMEC sent me a strange email. They asked me I knew a certain name. Apparently they’ve been corresponding with some guy who claims he’s associated with the Charley Project. They wanted to confirm this association.
I told them the person was lying to them and so was anyone else other than me who claimed to be associated with the Charley Project. I didn’t even recognize his name.
I first complained about the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s search engine back in 2013, and things got even worse with later versions of it. However, when I checked today, they’d made yet another version, which is slightly better than the last. Like, you can now search based on how old the child was when they disappeared. That’s kind of nice, I guess.
You still don’t have the ability to search by category, which they axed in 2013. As far as I can tell it’s because the NCMEC decided to phase out categories. They did this because when people saw “Family Abduction” or “Runaway” they just automatically tuned it out. I can understand the logic of the NCMEC’s thinking there.
I added Duke Flores‘s case today. It’s pretty awful. Probably not as bad as Noah McIntosh‘s (I blogged about his case in March), but it’s still pretty bad.
The whole story about Duke’s murder being prompted by his attempt he was trying to kill his infant cousin looks a little sketchy at first glance. However, both women gave the police the same account of the alleged attempted murder, and I wonder if Duke, who had autism, was just unable to deal with the baby’s crying. Most people with autism (including me) are very sensitive to noises.
They tried to cover up his disappearance by saying they’d taken Duke to a psychiatric hospital. If he was indeed trying to kill his cousin, this would have been a perfectly appropriate action to take. Certainly much more appropriate than strangling him.
We’ll never know if he really tried to smother the baby or not; the only two people alive to tell the story aren’t exactly credible witnesses. But no matter what he did there’s no excuse for murdering a six-year-old child with a disability.
The thing about his mom and aunt taking the other kids along while they disposed of his body is horrifying. Though the alternative would have been leaving them alone at home, and they were both really little. Hopefully too little to remember this later.
I hope these women get what’s coming to them. They are probably not very popular in jail; most of the women prisoners are mothers too.
So I called the NCMEC yet again to ask about kids they have listed as missing that don’t appear to be missing, a problem I have experienced repeatedly, and the lady I spoke to said the NCMEC is not, in fact, in charge of their poster database and says law enforcement can add posters at their leisure and that law enforcement has to tell the NCMEC to remove them.
I am somewhat unsure about this because none of the other people I complained to in the past has said this, but perhaps it’s a new policy or something.
She says if I want a kid taken off the NCMEC because they’re not missing anymore I should contact LE myself. This is something I am not willing to do, because it seems to me that the NCMEC ought to take responsibility for the posters that are on their website and have their logo on them, but what do I know?
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.
Remember this girl? The one who’s not missing? The NCMEC had promised to remove her from their site after I called them about it two. fracking. months. ago.
I officially give up.
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.
Remember this “white” girl?
Yeah, a blog reader contacted the NCMEC about this and she’s black.
Now they’re going to have to correct their little boo-boo that has filtered down to multiple other databases.
Garbage in, garbage out.
Remember my entry of June 6? Yeah, it just happened again.
The NCMEC says yet another young girl has been missing for over two years and it turns out she got found quite a long time ago, something the NCMEC itself is aware of, so…
It makes me wonder how many OTHER kids on their site were actually recovered a long time ago.
Ima have to write them a letter or something because this is just stupid.
So I added a runaway case from the NCMEC to Charley today and then had to pull it down within about five minutes.
The girl was missing from Cleveland, Ohio. Curiously, however, she wasn’t listed on either the Cleveland missing persons page or the Cuyahoga County missing persons page.
I began to smell a rat, checked Facebook, and found what I’m pretty sure is the girl’s Facebook page — an active one. Last posting was two days ago. If it is her, she’s going by a nickname for her legal name, and she’s put on a lot of weight and changed her hair significantly. But the Facebook girl’s nose looked exactly the same, the page said she lives in Cleveland, and the NCMEC poster noted that she may use the same nickname the Facebook page was under.
I called up the NCMEC hotline number (which I call often enough to have it in my cell phone contacts), to tell them about the active Facebook page. They told me she had been recovered already.
SO WHY IS SHE STILL LISTED AS A MISSING CHILD ON THEIR SITE?
I understand that no database is perfect — certainly mine isn’t — but this kind of thing really should not happen. It wasn’t even that the NCMEC didn’t realize she wasn’t missing anymore; they did know. But they forgot to pull her poster.
Their right hand doesn’t know what their left is doing. If I hadn’t seen that girl’s Facebook page — and, being as it’s under her nickname, it’s not super obvious — and decided to call it in, who knows how much longer she would have been erroneously listed as missing.
This kind of stuff is more than just annoying to people like me, it can cause a lot of trouble for the person in question. Suppose this young lady decides to apply for colleges or jobs or something, and gets rejected because people Google her name and think she’s a missing child?
The NCMEC is a private organization, but it is funded largely by grants from the U.S. Department of Justice, and it has a budget in the millions. It is also the most famous missing children’s nonprofit in the country. This kind of carelessness from them is unacceptable.
Muttergrumble.
NamUs has the case of Tebble Anita Garrett, with a reasonable amount of detail — tattoo description, several aliases, was pregnant — but there was (and is, as of this writing) no photo on the casefile. In January I was able to get a photo of her from Newspapers.com and so I added her to Charley, but the photo was a few years out of date — Tebble, it seems, had been a chronic runaway, and the photo I had was from an article about one of her disappearances two or three years prior to 1988.
But yay, the NCMEC has just put up a poster for her! With another photo, presumably more recent!
(And the poster, I note, has a different listed date and place of Tebble’s disappearance than NamUs does. Sometimes NamUs gives the date a person was reported missing as the date of disappearance — they’re hardly the only source that does that either. Given Tebble’s status as a chronic runaway, it’s possible her family didn’t report her missing for six weeks because they expected her to return on her own. Or it’s possible they didn’t report her missing at first, then couldn’t quite remember when she was last seen. Or it’s possible she disappeared from Easley, South Carolina on September 7, then was sighted in Pickens, South Carolina on October 18. The cities are only seven to ten miles apart, after all.)
Anyway. I’m so happy they added her. Tebble’s been missing for almost thirty years now and I really LOVE IT when the NCMEC adds new-old cases. It makes my day, actually. Especially new-old cases I haven’t heard of before. Recently they did Henrietta Geck Cruz Avila, and I was able to get some additional info from the Newspapers.com archive (I LOVE THAT ARCHIVE, thanks for paying for the subscription, you-know-who-you-are) about her case. It reminds me a bit of Beverly Sharpman‘s.
Anyway. Thanks, NCMEC.
The Charley Project Blog 