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.
NCMEC has recently changed the wording on their family abduction cases, from “abducted by non-custodial (relative)” to “allegedly abducted by (relative).” If it said “in the company of non-custodial (relative)” it now has removed the non-custodial bit. It’s a change I can understand. Defenders of parental abductors can get vehement, and I suspect this was related to lawsuit threats.
Doesn’t mean I like it, however. I don’t. I will continue to use “non-custodial” on the For the Lost site. If I find out there was no abduction, I’ll say that. However, I think that wording NCMEC has now takes away from the cases, as ninety-nine percent of the time there is no doubt whatsoever an abduction by a parent occured.
Go ahead, try to sue me for it. When your lawsuit gets dismissed (when, not if) I will countersue and you will be sorry. You have been warned.
Jahi Turner has just gotten an age-progression. After seven years. That’s too long. I’m glad to see it, but he should have had one five years ago, and the one we have now should be an updated one.
I’m aware this does disqualify him for Jahi’s Pages, but as he is our inspiration for that section, he will remain up. I have made some changes and added the age-progression, however.
There are a few long-standing cases that involve a child missing with a parent that are not on the For the Lost site. In many circumstances, I will label such a family abduction. What makes them ruled out?
In some cases, insufficent evidence exists to determine whether there was really an abduction. El-Jahid Allah, for example, was last seen with his non-custodial father, but I can determine nothing besides that. For all I know, they were homicide victims. So unless a warrant is issued for his arrest, I will leave it off. Maribel Oquendo-Carrerro is listed in a few places as abducted by her father, but on NCMEC she’s just listed as endangered with no message about the dad. Once again, unless there is proof provided, I can’t put it up. In Kayla Rosa’s case, I can’t even figure out what parent she was with, or if they have since been found. (Sites have listed both her mother and her father as the parent she was last seen with.)
In some others, I doubt it was a family abduction at all. James and Ptah Diamond, for example. Ptah was visiting his father in Arizona at the time; he normally resided in Cleveland. Researching the case online one day, I came across a post by James’ mother that detailed suspicious circumstances in the case. It’s possible both will turn up, but I doubt it. I’d like to be proven wrong. (The post was on a web site that has since vanished and I’ve never found another copy, however I remember most of the details.)
Some past cases I left off the site because I believed the parent abducted the kid to kill them. The Porter kids, for example. I was proven right. I wish I wasn’t, but in that case they did not qualify.
I added a part to the FAQ section in our site about cases like that. I mentioned that in the unlikely event that the “abductor” was actually along with their child a victim of homicide, I would resolve the case with a note to that effect if found and merely remove with the note if suspicious circumstances came up. I named a specific case there (Paul and Sarah Skiba) but when I wrote it I was actually thinking of a particular case. It’s since been resolved and I feel free to name it now. That case was the one of Joseph Kennedy. I treated it as a family abduction and the only evidence to the contrary was the mother’s family insisting foul play was possible. They created a sliver of doubt in my mind, and I added the note to that effect. Of course, it was an abduction, Joseph and his mother were both fine, and they were found in Mexico. I’m still keeping it up there, though. I could stil be proven wrong.
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.
I receive quite a bit of e-mail relating to the For the Lost site. There are suggestions, thanks, tips, and of course communications from the families of the missing.
Last week I received a communication that asked me to remove four children from my recovered photo gallery. I complied; although this case had been a family abduction it had never been on the actual site and it was possible it was due to some sort of misunderstanding.
Then I receive a missing child poster alert from NCMEC. The same four children were involved. This was not something I wanted to see. What made it worse was the article I later found on the Websleuths boards.
Police Issue Amber Alert for Four Children
Needless to say, I will be putting them up again when they are found, and not taking them down. And yes, the mother accused of abducting them was the person who wrote me. Who has already taken them three times. The sheer audacity of someone writing me to take down her kids’ photos a week before she abducts them again is almost funny.
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