MP of the week: Laurel Rogers

This week’s featured missing person is Laurel Lea Rogers, a 28-year-old woman who disappeared from Port Orange, Florida on February 1, 2010. She’s described as white, with light brown hair, blue eyes, pierced ears, several moles on her back, scars on her wrists, and scars and bruising on her arms and legs. She’s tall, somewhere bweetn 5’7 and 5’10, and weighed somewhere between 150 and 166 pounds at the time of her disappearance. The Charley Project page has a detailed description of her clothes and a photo of her wearing said clothes.

Unfortunately Laurel had a lot of problems in her life, most notably health problems which caused chronic pain. She had to take ten different prescription medicines each day, and she doesn’t have her medicine with her; without it she will eventually die. She would sometimes buy drugs on the street if her legitimate prescriptions weren’t helping out her pain.

Given her state of health, I think it’s unlikely she’s still alive, unless she’s somehow getting her medicine under another name. Which is possible I suppose. Whenever illicit drugs are a factor in a case you have to consider foul play.

I hope everyone is doing well. I’ve been really tired lately and feeling down on myself. I think I’ve got a bit of seasonal depression; I think things will pick up when the weather gets warmer and sunnier. February is such a terrible month in the midwest.

MP of the week: Shannon Hawkins

This week’s featured missing person is Shannon Marie Hawkins, a 35-year-old woman who was last seen in St. Johns, Florida on July 31, 2010. She’s white, 5’5 tall and weighed 135 pounds at the time of her disappearance. Her hair and eyes are naturally brown but at the time she went missing, her hair was dyed auburn.

It sounds like Shannon may have taken her own life. She has a history of suicide attempts due to depression, and was apparently in a crisis at the time she went missing, since she had placed a call to a mental health hotline the night before. In her diary she’d written that she wasn’t sure she would live to see her 36th birthday.

If suicide was what happened, though, her body has never been found.

Shannon would be 46 if she is still alive today. She left behind two children and a husband.

MP of the week: Kevin Persad

This week’s featured missing person is Kevin Anthony Persad, a 29-year-old man who disappeared while swimming off the coast of St. Petersburg, Florida on September 15, 2010. This case isn’t a big mystery. He’s presumed drowned, but they’ve never found his remains. I hope they are located someday.

Kevin is described as Asian (originally from Trinidad and Tobago, which has a high percentage of Indo-Caribbean people in its population) with black hair and brown eyes, 5’10 tall and 145 pounds. He was working in a customer service job but dreamed of being a fashion designer. Unfortunately his dreams probably ended in the Atlantic that day eleven years ago.

MP of the week: Ira Yallup

This week’s featured missing person is Ira Kennedy Yallup Sr., who disappeared from the Lone Pine fishing site on the Columbia River near The Dalles, Oregon on May 20, 2010. He was 47 years old at the time and would be 57 or 58 today, if still alive.

Because Yallup was last seen at a “fishing site” I initially assumed he probably drowned and listed him in the Lost/Injured Missing person category. However, when I decided to make him MP of the week I thought I’d look up more info on the site and discovered more than just fishing happens there: people actually live there, some year-round, some just during the fishing season, which lasts from spring to fall.

Although one resident described Lone Pine as a “close-knit community” in this article, the residents of the site live in some pretty bad conditions as this 2021 article makes clear:

At Lone Pine, blankets and boards cover broken windows on trailers and campers, some of which don’t even have doors. There is only one bathroom and two outdoor water spigots. One picnic shelter has been walled off and is being lived in, but two other picnic shelters have burned down. There is no fire hydrant at this encampment, and only one rutted lane, in and out.

It’s an extremely sad story involving the Columbia River dam and a bunch of broken promises to the Native Americans whose original villages and fishing sites were drowned when the dam was built.

Ira Yallup’s case is one of those “few details are available” ones and I don’t know if he was a year-round inhabitant of Lone Pine, was just there for the fishing season, or was visiting or what. Perhaps he drowned, or perhaps something else happened to him. I really can’t say.

MP of the week: Ayyub Pugh

This week’s featured missing person is Ayyub N. Pugh, a 45-year-old black man who disappeared from Layton, Utah on August 14, 2010. There isn’t much information about his disappearance, but there apparently aren’t any indications of foul play and he could still be alive somewhere.

Pugh suffers from mental illness and could be in a mental hospital/treatment program. He has used several different alias names in the past. He has previously lived in Florida and New York. If still alive he’d be 55.

MP of the week: Jesse Freeman

This week’s featured missing person is late. Sorry. In the last days of this dreadful year I’ve turned into a bit of a slug.

It’s Jesse Lee Freeman, a 56-year-old man who was last seen in Lufkin, Texas on July 1, 2010. He was homeless at the time and he may be use the name Herman Allison. I don’t have anything else on his case. If still alive, Freeman would now be 66 years old.

The police wouldn’t accept a report for a missing mentally disabled woman for over a year, and other stories

From Alabama: ‘I want my momma’: Family of Montgomery woman missing since 2018 wants answers. Donna Michelle Calloway disappeared in 2018, per the article, though her “few details” Charley Project casefile has it as 2019 — probably because the police wouldn’t take the report till then. I’ll have to update her case.

From Florida: Jupiter police say missing woman’s remains found after husband takes second-degree murder plea. Gretchen Anthony disappeared in March. Her estranged husband, David, was charged with kidnapping and first-degree murder in her case. He’s pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and kidnapping, and told police where to find her body, which was left three miles from Gretchen’s home.

From Kentucky: COLD CASE: Family of William Scott Crain searches for answers 26 years after disappearance. I don’t have William on Charley yet but he was added to NamUs in August. He was 22 when he disappeared from Bowling Green on November 21, 1994.

From New York: Family pleads for safe return of New York woman who’s been missing since October. Lynette Hernandez, a 27-year-old Nassau County resident, said she was moving to Brooklyn to be with a boyfriend. After not hearing from her, her family contacted the boyfriend, who said he hadn’t seen her in almost a week. Two different police departments each claims the other has jurisdiction over the case.

From Washington DC: Unique Harris disappearance: Man charged with murder a decade after woman goes missing and Arrest made in cold case murder 10 years after DC mother vanished. Unique RaQuel-Leona Harris, a 24-year-old mother of two, was last seen in 2010. Her body has never been found. The suspect is someone I’ve never heard of before, but he was an acquaintance of Unique’s and had been on the police radar for years, not the least cause he left his DNA at the crime scene.

From New Zealand: Cold Case murder mystery: What happened to Marion Granville? A mother of three young children, she disappeared in 1980, at the age of 29. Her partner at the time is asking for anyone with information to come forward. He believes she’s dead and just wants to be able to properly bury her.

From Singapore: Choa Chu Kang girl disappears in 2002, allegedly calls 1 year later: ‘Someone won’t let me come back’. Tina Lim Xin Ying was 14 when she disappeared while en route to visit her sick grandfather. She hasn’t been seen since, and the police are still not sure whether the phone call was from her.

MP of the week: Isaac Robin

Hi, all. This week’s featured missing person is from the U.S. Virgin Islands; I think he might be the first Virgin Islands case I’ve ever made missing person of the week. Isaac Robin Jr., a twenty-year-old black man, disappeared on January 29, 2010.

A short geography lesson: the Virgin Islands are an archipelago in the Caribbean Sea; some British overseas territorial possessions, some are considered a part of the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, and the rest comprise another U.S. territory, formally called the Virgin Islands of the United States. There are three main U.S. Virgin Islands and fifty or so tiny ones. Not many people live on the island of St. John; the main population is split roughly equally between St. Thomas (where the capital city, Charlotte Amalie, is located) and St. Croix (from where Isaac Robin disappeared).

Unfortunately I don’t really have any details about Isaac’s disappearance. He was last seen near his home and was reported missing by his family four days later. For what it’s worth, he didn’t disappear during hurricane season, which runs between June and November.

A year or two ago I spoke with a journalist from the Virgin Islands; I think it was the same woman who wrote this article about Virgin Islands missing persons. I asked her, given how tiny the land area is and how many tourists go tromping through islands, if it would be possible for a body to go undiscovered on land. She said the islands have a lot of thick tangles of tropical jungle where a person could be walking just a few feet from a corpse and have no idea. I am not going to speculate what happened to Isaac Robin, but I thought it was worth including that information.

If still alive, he would be 31 today. He’s been missing for ten, going on eleven years.

Thank you all for my birthday and wedding good wishes. I appreciate it.

MP of the week: Anthony Johnson

This week’s featured missing person is Anthony Amadeo Johnson, a 52-year-old man who disappeared on August 29, 2010 from his home in Fort Myers Beach, Florida. He’s got some disabilities, including trouble walking and memory lapses, and is supposed to take a lot of medications which he doesn’t have.

There isn’t much about his disappearance, but I wonder if he might be homeless, perhaps not knowing who he is or how to get home. He’s got a distinctive appearance, in that his body is just about covered in tattoos.

If still alive, Johnson would be 61 today.

Stay safe everyone. Stay home if you can, and WASH YOUR HANDS.

Native American Heritage Month: Sumi Juan

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 Sumi Gail Juan, a 33-year-old Hoopa woman who disappeared from Hoopa, California on September 8, 2010.

Hoopa, California is a town in northern California and per Wikipedia, 80-plus percentage of the population is Native.

The police noted they had two persons of interest, also Native, whom they wanted to talk to: Robert Hodge Jr. and Debra Jealous-Of-Him.

It’s worth noting I’ve found NO mention AT ALL about Sumi since 2010 and I’m not 100% sure she is still missing.