I have just heard that Manuela Antonelli, non-custodial mother of Liam McCarty, has been arrested in Italy. Liam was apparently not with her at the time.
I hope this is the beginning of the end of both the abduction and the turbulence in Liam’s life. He’s been through enough already.
I noticed that a missing child, Diana Alagha, was no longer on NCMEC. I sent an e-mail to them, reproduced below.
Do you know if Diana Alagha has been found? She’s not on NCMEC or the California DOJ anymore.
Annie
I got back a one word response.
“Deceased.”
I didn’t want to see this once. I’ve now seen it twice.
I will resolve her case, and put up a new one, but not right now. I need to go off and cry for a bit.
edit: resolved case. Sage Bermudez Rayon has been added to the site.
I have just received word Richard Chekevdia has been found safe. According to this article, he has spent the past two years in a hidden four by twelve room. To give you an idea how small that is, it’s only slightly larger than a two person Smart car. He was not allowed to go outside. I’m used to bad treatment of kids in these cases, but these circumstances still stun me. I have resolved his case. The new case on the site is that of Sean Morrow.
I never wanted this to happen to family abduction kids on my site.
It now has.
All three were found dead in their father’s car, which had been run into a lake. The father was also inside. It coud be accident. It could have been murder/suicide. No one will ever know.
I’ve added the cases of Adam and Jason Shannon and Luis Munguia-Zendejas. I’ve updated the victims post. Right now I’m too depressed to do anything else.
On the For the Lost web page is the excellent essay by Meaghan Good, The Middle Eastern Abduction Myth. It is still unfortunate that the myth that most parental abductors are Middle Eastern males persists. I was curious how this applied to our site specifically. What percentage of cases possibly involve the Middle East, and do the gender ratios seem unbalanced?
For this I looked at all 375 cases on the site. The only ones included in this sample were ones taken or possibly in the following countries: Egypt, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Qatar, Kuwait, Yemen, Oman, Jordan, United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain. While Iran is technically a Persian nation and not a Middle Eastern one it is considered as such by most of the population and thus it has been included. Turkey was excluded for being considered a European nation and both Afghanistan and Pakistan were excluded for being Asian nations. Twenty three cases met this criteria. Of those, seventeen involved fathers and six involved mothers. So while it appears that fathers are more common abductors amongst children taken to Middle Eastern countries, the total of children taken to them is a small amount compared to the whole picture.
There are currently 375 children listed on the For the Lost site as cases on the Adam Haseeb Memorial pages. For the interested, here are some facts and breakdown of statistics of these cases.
The average age of a child in this section is 4.2 years. The two oldest missing children are Jose Medina Lopez and Viridiana Urias, who are both sixteen years old. The youngest children are four months old, and they are Hannah Pobursky, Angel Rosales, Sneha Pierce, Abril Comstock, and Joliet Cedano. A total of nineteen children were under the age of one when abducted and twenty-three were ten years or older. These numbers are consistant with most statements that young children are more likely to be abducted. Older children usually have more resources they can use to escape an abductor, although this can be negated if they are taken out of the country. Children under the age of one are also not frequently taken, presumably because the non-custodial parent would rather not have the responsibility of caring for an infant. This could also be because visitation for very young children is typically strictly monitored.
Out of the 375 children on the site, there are 290 seperate cases. 98 are of single male children (thirty-four percent), 124 are of single female children (forty-three percent), 18 are of groups of male children (six percent), 14 are of groups of female children (five percent), and 36 are mixed gender groups (twelve percent). 162 children were abducted by their mother (fifty-six percent), 7 by their mother and her boyfriend or stepfather (two percent), 99 by their father (thirty-four percent), 3 by their father and grandmother (one percent), 2 by their stepfather (one percent), 3 by their grandmother (one percent), 5 by their grandparents (two percent), 4 by both parents (one percent), 3 by an unknown relative (one percent). One case involved half siblings being abducted by one’s father, who was the other’s stepfather, and one case involved half siblings being abducted by their mother and one’s father.
Of the children in the cases, 101 are of Caucasian descent (thirty-five percent), 16 of African-American descent (six percent), 15 of Asian descent (five percent), 115 of Hispanic descent (forty percent), and 42 are biracial (fourteen percent). Of the biracial children, 5 are black and white (twelve percent), 10 are asian and white (twenty-four percent), 12 are hispanic and white (twenty-nine percent), 5 are asian and hispanic (twelve percent), 2 are asian and black (five percent), 4 are black and hispanic (ten percent), 1 is American Indian and white, and one is American Indian and hispanic. In two cases the racial mix was unknown.
Only eight cases have never been listed on NCMEC. Fourteen were once listed but have been removed. 140 have been missing for nine years or over (forty-eight percent). Only three have been missing for less than a year (one percent).
In twelve cases, caution was advised when approaching the parent. In two of these cases, no reason was given. In six, the parent was wanted for homicide. In the remaining four, they were merely believed to be armed or otherwise dangerous.
This is of course an incomplete look at the cases and I hope to be able to go into some deeper analysis later on.