Navajo-language missing persons posters and more stories

From the border states: the the Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains Act has been approved by Congress and awaits the President’s signature to be signed into law. The Act is designed to enhance the recording and reporting of missing persons and unidentified persons along the U.S./Mexico border and includes several measures towards that end.

From Arizona/New Mexico: the FBI has released some Navajo-language posters about unsolved missing persons and murder cases that occurred on or near the Navajo Nation. The missing persons include Anthonette Christine Cayedito, missing from Gallup, New Mexico since 1986; Laverda Sorrell, missing from Fort Defiance, Arizona since 2002; and Jamie Lynnette Yazzie, missing from Pinon, Arizona since 2019. Serious question, and I mean no disrespect to the Navajo Nation: is there actually anyone who can read Navajo who cannot also read English, or are these posters more of a public relations exercise than anything?

From Arkansas: this article details the murder-without-a-body case of Christopher Todd Armstrong, who went missing from Magnolia on March 7, 1998. Although Kenny Wayne Whiddon Jr. pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the case, served his prison term and was released in 2008, Armstrong’s body has never been found.

From California/Oregon: they’re still searching for Danielle Bisnell, who disappeared on December 10 last year, while traveling from Lebanon, Oregon to Redding, California.

From California: they’re still searching for Angela Marie Fullmer, a 34-year-old mother of three who disappeared from Mount Shasta, California on December 15, 2002.

Also from California: they’re still searching for Manuel Calderon, who disappeared from Hacienda Heights on September 8 this year.

Also from California: they’re released more info on a “few details” case I had, the disappearance of Amber Aiaz and her twelve-year-old daughter Melissa Fu from Irvine on November 22, 2019. According to Aiaz’s husband, a Chinese man and woman rendered him unconscious with an unknown substance and when he woke up his wife and daughter were gone. Very strange. If the police think this is a kidnapping, I don’t understand why this information didn’t appear in the news for over a year.

From Illinois: Angela Renee Siebke has been charged with first-degree murder in the death of a newborn girl whose body was found floating inside a trash bag in the Mississippi River in Moline, Illinois on April 11, 1992. Siebke lives in Ohio now, but in 1992 she was a resident of Orion, Illinois. DNA proved she was the unidentified baby’s mother.

Also from Illinois: they’re still looking for Requita “Aaliyah” Goff, who disappeared from Chicago on November 28, 2019.

Also from Illinois: they’re found remains believed to be of Kimberly Stewart-Whittington, who went missing from Harrisburg in September 2019.

From Montana: the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes are creating a tribal community response plan for missing Native American people.

From New Mexico: This article states the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Task Force, which was formed a year ago to address the problem of violence against Native American women, has made a “dogged but incomplete effort” in the face of the pandemic and incomplete data. The entire 64-page report is here.

From Texas: there’s an article about Rusty Arnold’s search for his sister Mary Rachel Trlica and her friends, Lisa “Renee” Wilson and Julie Ann Moseley, who all disappeared under strange circumstances from Fort Worth in 1974.

From British Columbia, Canada: They’re still looking for Randolph Quilt, a Xeni Gwet’in First Nation man who disappeared from Williams Lake on September 26. He wasn’t reported missing till November 29.

From Germany/the UK: two-year-old Emmanuel Biendarra, who was abducted from the UK by his mother in 2019, has been found safe in Germany and returned to Britain, where his searching father lives.

From Nigeria: the 344 abducted Nigerian boys mentioned in the last article dump have been freed. It turns out they were taken not by Boko Haram, but by bandits pretending to be Boko Haram.

From Singapore: A suspect, Ahmad Danial Mohamed Rafa’ee, has been charged with murder in the disappeared of Felicia Teo, a fine arts student who went missing in 2007. Teo’s body has never been found. A suspected accomplice in the murder, Ragil Putra Setia Sukmarahjana, has been named also, but the police haven’t located him yet; he is no longer in Singapore. This article has more info on the case.

From Taiwan: they’ve found a woman, identified only as Hsieh, who went missing from Changhua County twelve years ago when she was only eleven years old. She was apparently abducted by her non-custodial mother and turned up in Kaohsiung in an “undernourished state” weighing only 36 kilograms, or 79 pounds. To keep Hsieh from being found, her mom had confined her to their apartment and not let her go to school or to the hospital. When she was reunited with her father and brother, she no longer recognized them, and she “appeared to be suffering from social behavioral disorders.” No wonder, after being imprisoned in an apartment for over half her life. Such an awful story.

MP of the week: Christina Burnett-Pitts

This week’s featured missing person is Christina Carol Burnett-Pitts. She was in her mid-twenties when she disappeared from the Poplar Bluff, Missouri area sometime between Christmastime in 1998 (which is when her family last saw her) and 2000.

She had a transient lifestyle and no fixed address, was involved with drugs including meth, and was reportedly a victim of domestic violence by her husband, who is now deceased. So the circumstances of her disappearance, while unclear, don’t look good.

She has two children who were living with her parents when she disappeared. If still alive, she’d be 46 today. I’m sure her children would like to learn what happened to her.

Thanks for all the lovely comments about my wedding pictures, they made me very happy!

Stay safe, everyone. Happy Thanksgiving.

Black History Month: Shy’Kemmia Pate

In honor of Black History Month I’m profiling one African-American MP every day on this blog for the month of February. Today’s case is Shy’Kemmia Shy’Rezz Pate, an eight-year-old girl who disappeared from Unadilla, Georgia on September 4, 1998.

Shy’Kemmia appears to have been abducted. Everyone in her family was cleared as a suspect, but the theory is that whoever did take her was someone she was familiar with. That could mean a lot of people — I mean, a neighbor, a teacher, a stocker at the corner store? She didn’t live in the greatest neighborhood.

I think it’s important to note that Shy’Kemmia had significant health problems, and the result is that if she is ever located, dead or alive, it should be easy to identify her. She had bad kidneys and a weak bladder and had to wear Pull-Ups — not exactly common in a grade-schooler — and she was also wearing a leg brace due to a displaced kneecap. She had surgery for the kidney issue and has a scar on her back at the waistline from this.

I highly doubt she’s still alive, for medical reasons alone; she would have needed regular treatment to survive to adulthood. But if Shy’Kemmia is still alive she would now be thirty this year.

Native American Heritage Month: Kimberly Mullens

In honor of Native American Heritage Month I’m featuring a Native American missing person for every day in the month of November. Today’s missing person is Kimberly Doreen Mullens, a 33-year-old woman who disappeared from Tulsa, Oklahoma on June 1, 1998. I don’t know her tribe.

The circumstances of her disappearance are suspicious, as she was in an abusive marriage. Her husband said she simply left him after an argument, but that’s the kind of story we hear a lot.

Well, this is absolutely terrible

So I’m trying to ease back into things, still not feeling the greatest, and I ran Nelda Louise Hardwick‘s name through Newspapers.com and came across an awful story.

Nelda may have been killed along Interstate 10 in Hancock County, Mississippi on May 10, 1998, four and a half years after her disappearance from Lake Charles, Louisiana on October 14, 1993.

The unidentified woman was a pedestrian who was struck by a vehicle on the interstate. In 2013, Nelda’s family identified the dead woman as her based on photos of the body.

The coroner was quoted as saying there was just “one chance in a thousand” that the body wasn’t Nelda, and speculated she was held captive the entire time and somehow managed to finally escape, only to be killed on the road.

An exhumation was duly ordered, but when they dug up the Jane Doe’s grave in St. Joseph Cemetery, they found a MAN in the coffin, not a woman. The judge ordered the proceedings stopped, writing, “Unfortunately, it appears that the remains at the Jane Doe headstone were not those of Jane Doe. Further, the chief medical examiner advises it is obvious that the location of her grave is unknown.”

So Nelda is still listed among the missing, and this Jane Doe is now missing as well and will probably NEVER be identified now.

I cannot imagine how devastating this must have been for Nelda’s family.

Black History Month: Shannon Darnell Harris

In honor of Black History Month I’m profiling one African-American MP every day on this blog for the month of February. Today’s case is Shannon Darnell Harris, who disappeared from Houma, Louisiana on October 10, 1998. This date also happened to be his thirtieth birthday.

Harris visited his mom in Houma that day, then left to take a bus back to Dallas, Texas, where he was living and going to art school. He apparently never made it to the bus stop. Foul play is suspected in his case and it may have been drug-related; he was involved with drugs.

MP of the week: Dorien Thomas

This week’s featured missing person is Dorien Deon Thomas, a nine-year-old boy who disappeared from Amarillo, a city in the Texas panhandle, on October 26, 1998. He was (probably) going for a bike ride around the neighborhood when he vanished, and, unusually, the bike disappeared with him and was never found.

Dorien will have been missing for twenty years next year. He’d be 28 now, if he is still alive. I suppose there is no hard evidence that he isn’t; Jaycee Dugard turned up alive after quite a long time. The most recent news article I found on his case was from last fall.

Sorry guys, I promise I’ll update today

Yeah, I meant to start updating Charley again on Sunday and that didn’t happen. I was a lot more tired from that trip than I thought, and it kind of flipped my sleep schedule around as well. I don’t use my computer much if at all after about nine o’clock p.m. because Michael gets home from work then.

Was going to update yesterday after going to my therapy appointment. I would have gotten home at five p.m., but due to unforeseen circumstances I didn’t make it back home till seven, then Michael arrived home an hour early from work.

Anyway, the missing person of the week is Arturo Flores Vasquez, who disappeared from the border town of San Ysidro, California in 1998, the day before his birthday. (I ought to do a list of people who disappeared on or very close to their birthdays. Sofia Juarez is another that comes to mind.)

And I had another Executed Today entry that ran yesterday: Edward Hogsden, hanged in 1831. Another child abuse case, although it was sexual abuse in this case. It’s a terrible story, almost as bad as the last one.

MP of the week: Shy’Kemmia Pate

This week’s featured missing person is Shy’Kemmia Shy’Rezz Pate, a beautiful eight-year-old girl who’s been missing from Unadilla, Georgia for nearly twenty years now: September 4, 1998. There hasn’t been a lot of news about this disappearance, but on the face of it it’s a non-family abduction — by who, they don’t seem to know.

The family has a Facebook page set up for the little girl, nicknamed ShyShy.

Raymond Matlock identified

Per Charley Project Irregular Jennifer C., Raymond Lee Matlock, who disappeared during an elk hunting trip in Washington in November in 1998, was identified last December. His remains were actually found less than a month after he disappeared; it appears he drowned in the Bone River, which feeds into the Pacific, and his body drifted some 125 miles up the Washington coast to Vancouver Island.

Such a long journey is unusual for drifting bodies, and that’s a big part of the reason Matlock remained unidentified for 18 years. But I think this case is also a good example of why detailed clothing descriptions are important wherever possible. The body was found wearing a distinctive t-shirt with a drawing of a truck, surfboards and the words “Jimmy Z” — something the police at the time might help identify him, except that if anyone knew what Matlock was wearing when he disappeared, they never bothered to say.

The management of the Washington cemetery where he was buried combined forces with a local crematory to exhume his remains, cremate them and ship them to his mom in Texas at no cost to her. That was nice of them.