I’ll be out of Facebook Jail in a week. Here’s some more news.

From California:

• They’re still looking for Khrystyna Carreno, a twelve-year-old girl who disappeared from Bakersfield in November 2020. (The article spells her name “Khrystina” but the NCMEC and CDOJ spell it “Khrystyna” so I’m going to go with that.) I don’t have her on Charley but figure I should add her. Twelve is very young, obviously, and she’s been missing for a year and a half now. I hope she’s alive and hasn’t been trafficked. Here’s Khrystyna’s NCMEC poster.

From Florida:

• The police searched a Largo, Florida property in connection with the long-ago disappearances of three women, who were all dating the same man: Margaret R. Dash, missing since 1974, Retha Lee Hiers, missing since 1982, and Donyelle Chrishum Johnson, missing since 1989. Unfortunately the search turned up nothing.

From Georgia:

• They have finally identified the little boy whose corpse was found outside Atlanta over 20 years ago. His name was William DaShawn Hamilton and he was six years old when he was murdered. William was never reported missing. His mother, Teresa Ann Bailey Black, has been charged with felony murder, cruelty to children, aggravated assault and concealing the death of another.

From Michigan:

• They’re still looking for Kathy Sue Wilcox, a 15-year-old girl last seen in Otsego in 1972. She got into an argument with her parents over an older boy she was dating, stomped out angrily and was never seen again. Kathy would be 65 today. Kathy’s sister does not believe she ran away, and made reference to a “significant antisocial person who was in [Kathy’s] life,” whom she thinks could have been involved.

From Minnesota:

• Remains found in Rosemount in 2014 have been identified as James Everett, a New York man who was not listed as missing. They do not know the cause or manner of death, but they believe Everett died sometime in the autumn months of 2013. I wonder if he died of exposure; Minnesota can get very cold, and I doubt a “decommissioned railroad utility shed” would have heat or insulation.

From New Hampshire:

• They’re still looking for 15-year-old Shirley Ann “Tippy” McBride, last seen in Concord in 1984. Although there haven’t been any new developments, the article talks about the case in great detail.
• They’re still looking for Maura Murray, and are searching an unspecified “area in the towns of Landaff and Easton.” This search isn’t based on any new info, though, they’re just shooting in the dark.

From New York:

• They’re trying to find Judith Threlkeld, a 22-year-old woman who disappeared from Chautauqua County in 1976. She was last seen walking home from the library. I added the case to Charley yesterday.

From North Dakota:

• Check out this awesome in-depth three-part series on the 1996 disappearances of Sandra Mary Jacobson and her son, John Henry Jacobson: part 1 | part 2 | part 3 (this last part is paywalled, but I was invested enough to fork over two bucks for a subscription). Very mysterious case. I feel terrible for Sandra’s older son, Spencer: he lost his mom and half-brother, literally, and later on his father was murdered, and neither of these cases have been solved. A few years after the murder of Spencer’s father, Spencer’s wife died tragically young at 24, from strep throat of all things, leaving him a young widower with three kids. Poor Spencer has had enough bad luck to last a lifetime.

From Ohio:

• They’re still looking for Charles King Blanche, a 39-year-old man who disappeared from his Youngstown group home in 1991. Blanche’s cousin says he was a very talented musician who was recruited to tour in Europe in a marching band, but his life kind of cratered after he developed an unspecified severe mental illness. An all-too-common story on the Charley Project.

From Texas:

• It’s being reported that sometimes when Texan foster kids run away, the agencies just wash their hands of them and end their guardianship over them. This sounds terrible, but given how often foster agencies fail their wards, and given as it’s Texas where they can’t even keep the lights on, I’m not entirely surprised.
• Using genetic genealogy, they have identified a Jane Doe whose partial remains were found south of Midland in 2013. The victim was Sylvia Nicole Smith, who disappeared in 2000 at the age of sixteen. The case is being investigated as homicide.

From Virginia

• Cory Bigsby, the father of four-year-old Codi Bigsby, has been indicted on thirty counts, the majority of them child neglect charges. Codi has been missing since January. None of the indictments are related to his disappearance; they’re connected to Cory’s allegedly terrible parenting from prior to Codi’s disappearance. Codi has not been missing long enough to go up on Charley, so here’s his NCMEC poster, and here’s another poster for him.

From Washington state:

• There are forty known Native American people listed as missing from the Yakima area. And here’s a list of all the Native Americans listed as missing from the entire state.

From Washington DC:

• They’re still looking for Relisha Tenau Rudd, an eight-year-old girl who disappeared from a Dickensian homeless shelter in 2014. I’ve blogged about Relisha several times, as recently as earlier this week when they put up a new AP for her. If still alive, Relisha would now be 16. Here’s another detailed article about her case, with links to the earlier series of articles the Washington Post did about it.

And in general:

• Although they don’t drop kids from the guardianship rolls when they disappear, in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Illinois, most missing foster kids who resurface are not screened to see if they were trafficked during the time they were gone. The article says Texas actually has a better record in this regard, with over 80% of missing-and-then-located foster kids being screened. But the number should ideally be 100%.
• My husband has persuaded me to finally turn the Charley Project into an official registered nonprofit organization. Right now we’re saving up the money to pay a lawyer to file the paperwork to do this though it’s going to be awhile at this rate; money is super tight right now. If the Charley Project is a registered nonprofit, all donations will become tax-deductible and also the organization could become the recipient of grants. I’d use the grants to travel to more missing persons events, and pay the subscription fees for more databases to use in researching cases, and maybe hire an editor or something.

New age-progression for Relisha Rudd just dropped

So I just put up a new age-progression for Relisha Tenau Rudd, last seen in Washington D.C. in 2014 at the age of eight. The AP shows her as she might appear at her current age of 16.

I don’t normally make whole new blog entries just for one AP, but I have a particularly soft spot for Relisha as it seems every adult and every institution she came across in her short life, failed her miserably.

Washington DC votes to close Relisha Rudd’s shelter

I just found out that the Washington D.C. city council has voted to close the D.C. General Hospital homeless shelter Relisha Rudd lived in when she disappeared. About fracking time.

In her casefile I describe the shelter in this way: it was “filthy, chaotic, crime-ridden, infested with vermin and had no playground.” Oh, and it had a creepy janitor named Kahlil Tatum who really liked little girls.

Certainly there are those who are more responsible for Relisha Rudd’s disappearance than others, but what happened to her seems to have been so much a result of the problems with society at large. I swear they invented whole new cracks in the system for Relisha to fall through.

I would like to say I think the closing of that Dickensian shelter might prevent more Relisha cases from happening in the future, but I don’t have that kind of optimism.

Shades of Relisha Rudd again

I was reading this article about the terrible conditions in New York City homeless shelters and I thought about the shelter Relisha Rudd lived in, and felt like crying. From the article:

Inspectors from the Department of Investigation were similarly dismayed after surveying 25 cluster site and city shelters last year. Conditions were “bluntly Dickensian,” declared DOI Commissioner Mark G. Peters when the report came out in March. They found infestations of rats, mice and roaches. Among other delights investigators observed, “a dead rat in a cluster apartment where four children lived, the decaying smell of which permeated the hallways.”

In addition to varied species of vermin, investigators discovered locked exits and blocked passageways that could obstruct escape in emergencies. In one city-run shelter, a rusted-out staircase was unusable, giving 140 residents only one way out of the building; when DOI called on the FDNY to inspect the site, they deemed the situation so dangerous they wanted to evacuate the building. Instead they made do with posting fire guards to regulate traffic in case of a fire.

They also found exposed electrical wiring and nonworking fire alarms, water damage and mold. One woman told investigators her electricity was often shut off for days at a time.

Although infractions were also found in non-profit shelters, the worst offenders were cluster site shelters (though city run shelters also had dangerous and unsanitary conditions). For the public service of taking in homeless families with vermin-infested apartments, the city paid landlords an average of $2,451 per month, according to the report (some are paid over $3,000). The market rate for regular apartments in these neighborhoods range from $528 to $1,200 a month.

(Let me emphasize here that these are NYC shelters. But Relisha’s shelter in Washington DC was very much the same. I read about one couple there that was interviewed by the Washington Post, who stayed up all night working in shifts, to keep the roaches off their sleeping baby son. That detail has stuck in my head ever since.) If a family was living in their own home with vermin everywhere and exposed wires like as described in the article, chances their kids would get taken into foster care because of “unsafe living conditions.”

Getting back to Relisha: How many other little Relishas are running around out there? God only knows what that Mr. Tatum was doing to her when no one was watching. But he took her out of that horrible environment and to a place that was quiet and clean and not overcrowded. He bought her things, made her feel special, when quite possibly no one had ever made her feel special in her entire life. That’s often how it starts, sexual abuse I mean. Relisha might have been willing to do literally anything, just to maintain that sense that she was his special little girl. (Assuming he did abuse her, a theory of which I admit is without proof at this point, but is, let’s face it, more likely than not.)

I actually talked about this with friends. Now, Relisha’s mom was, at minimum, an idiot, who had a previous history with child protective services for neglecting her kids. She was, at least, partially responsible for whatever it was that happened to her daughter. But let’s take me instead. Suppose my children and I were living in conditions like the ones in Relisha’s shelter (which I describe in her casefile as “filthy, chaotic, crime-ridden, infested with vermin and had no playground” and frankly all of that doesn’t even begin to portray how awful it was there) and there was no way of getting out any time soon. My choices are:

1. Keep Relisha in the shelter with me, even though the environment is terrible and bugs are everywhere etc. and the staff bribe and/or coerce sexual services out of the residents and I do not have the ability to provide a safe haven for her.
2. Let the janitor guy take Relisha to his nice clean quiet house to stay over for awhile, where at least she won’t have to deal with rats or chaos and what have you, and might be able to play outside and do stuff children are supposed to be able to do. Take into account the fact that I know the janitor is creepy and odds are he’s a pedophile.

Either option is bad. Neither is good for Relisha; both leave her open to being mistreated by other adults. And no mother should have to choose between the creepy janitor and the fourth-world conditions under which they were living.

Look…I don’t know where I’m going there…it’s just that this kind of thing really makes me sad and angry. The more so because, there but for the grace of God go I. I’ve said it before: you guys don’t know me, not really. Online I sound a lot higher functioning than I really am. In real life I am significantly impacted by my autism and mental illness and need help on a regular basis. If I didn’t have a boyfriend and a family, one that was willing and able to support me, I could end up homeless too.

Capitalist, socialist, conservative, liberal, Republican, Democrat, whatever your beliefs social, economic and political, no one should want this happening to any family. Certainly not in the richest country in the world.

Okay, finished writing up Relisha Rudd

I had dreaded doing Relisha Rudd‘s case because I knew it would take a long time to do and it would be very depressing. It did take a long time to do — around four hours, all told — and it was one of the saddest stories I’ve had to write in a very long time. Not her disappearance but her entire life. I praise the Washington Post for their excellent series of articles on her disappearance and the circumstances around it; they were the main source for my writeup.

Of course the Charley Project database is meant to be written in a journalistic style without passing judgement one way or another, but I hope the reader will be able to feel the outrage that I felt, reading what that poor girl went through.

Now I’ve got to find a few other cases to write up so I can reach my minimum number of five cases for the day’s update. I think I’ll pick easy ones. “Few details are available.”

God, I’m tired.

[ADDENDUM: I give up. Today’s updates will number only three.]