Story by Spencer Clifton | Design & Illustration by Kayla Craig

Your heart free falls into the pit of your stomach. The feeling of sheer panic creeps up the back of your spine and scrambling thoughts begin racing through your head. Shared emotions of grief and fear fill the room as you and your family now try to grasp the reality that your child is miss-ing. Will your family ever be whole again?

Such horrific thoughts and questions may plague the minds of family members surrounding a missing child. There are many circumstances that a child can go missing under, and it is up to law enforcement and public engagement to bring them home safely.

As uncommon as it seems, there are 1,901 missing persons in Washington State as of May 18, 2020, according to Carri Gordon, program manager for the Missing and Unidentified Per-sons Unit (MUPU) with Washington State Patrol. Of those missing persons, 861 are under the age of 17 and 60 are under the age of 10.

Assessing the Circumstances

Gary Nelson, homicide detective sergeant and supervisor of the Cold Case and Missing Persons Unit for the Seattle Police Department, sheds some light on working missing children’s cases at the local level.

When someone reports that someone went missing, the person who made the report is interviewed in order to determine if the case meets criteria for an investigation. “We actually have a much quicker full-on search and everything else depending on the circumstance,” says Nelson.

Ingrid Arbuthnol-Stohl, special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) says, “The circumstances in which a child may go missing are vastly different … We consider anybody under the age of 18 to be a child. So, you can imagine there are different circumstances that involve a four-year-old that goes missing versus a 16-year-old who goes missing.”

In hand with age, assessing other variables like homelife and the history of the child is necessary for law enforcement to make their next move.

“We need to look at their history. Do we have a fifteen-year-old who is a chronic runaway? Has this runaway been known to be victim of sex trafficking?” says Arbuthnol-Stohl. Answers to these questions will lead to how law enforcement and the FBI conduct these investigations.

“If it comes to something like a younger child or a child who has not been known to run away [or] there are weird circumstances surrounding,” says Arbuthnol-Stohl. “Oftentimes those come in via an AMBER Alert … We are required to check in with the police department within an hour of being notified.”

Different circumstances in cases call for different protocols from the police department. Assessing these circumstances is the first step to seeing where the missing child case goes from there.

A Team Effort

In order to bring a child home safely and utilize all available resources, law enforcement may team up with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and the FBI.

Vice President of the Missing Children Division for the NCMEC John Bischoff says, “NCMEC offers a variety of resources to support law enforcement and the family in the search for missing children. One of our most commonly used resources is poster distribution … Other resources include, but [are] not limited to, access to publicly accessible databases, specialized Search & Rescue resources and access to Forensic Specialists.”

The NCMEC works on thousands of cases at a time from all over the country, according to Bischoff. Their efforts have proven to be useful as the NCMEC has helped recover over 370,000 children.

“At any one given time, NCMEC is assisting with 6,000 to 7,000 missing child cases. A majority of these cases, about 4,000, have been missing for longer than one year,” says Bischoff.

In hand with the national center, law enforcement can also tap into resources from the FBI in order to solve these missing children cases, if needed.

According to Arbuthnol-Stohl, The FBI special agents can offer a variety of resources to police departments that those departments may not have at their disposal.

“We can offer resources from all over the country, we have thousands of agents and most people will jump to help on a missing child case,” says Arbuthnol-Stohl, “We bring people, we bring expertise … we have analysts, we have databases, we have a behavioral analysis unit to help do timelines and profiling and that kind [of] resourcing.”

Law enforcement, the FBI and the NCMEC work diligently together to ensure the safety of missing children.

Child Abductions

While there are many different circumstances in which a child can go missing, one that may test law enforcement and rattle the public are child abductions.

“If you look at the statistics, you have about two hours from the time of the abduction until that child comes to harm. Oftentimes it will end in a homicide,” says Arbuthnol-Stohl.

With a countdown looming over the heads of law enforcement, drastic action may have to be taken to ensure the safety of an abducted child.

In the event of a child abduction, a number of variables come into play to return the child to safety. Some of these include whether the abduction was from a stranger or from someone in the child’s family and where the child was last seen, according to Nelson.

“Sometimes, most often, if they are abducted it is by a family member or friend,” says Arbuth-nol-Stohl. “So sometimes they will go to another person’s house, or their parent comes and picks them up and runs with them.”

“If we have a situation where a young person has gone missing and we have a vehicle perhaps of interest, usually in a domestic situation, that can be put on an AMBER Alert right away and the whole state will be notified,” says Nelson.

According to the United States Department of Justice, “AMBER Alerts are emergency messages issued when a law enforcement agency deter-mines that a child has been abducted and is in imminent danger.”

In order to avoid overusing the system, the MUPU dispatches these alerts only if they fit specific criteria, according to Gordon.

“The AMBER Alerts are only intended for children 17 years and younger, and the criteria wording also says the child is known to have been abducted. It is not intended for runaway children or abandoned children; it is intended for a true abduction,” says Gordon, “We want the AMBER Alert to be used if only the child is in imminent danger of serious bodily injury or death.”

The AMBER Alert system is used if there is a known vehicle associated in the case. In these circumstances, it is then up to the public to pay attention and call in the vehicle or child if spotted.

Gordon says, “The statistics are showing that now [that] we have the wireless emergency alerts, or the cell phone alerts, these cases are ending usually within thirty minutes sometimes and that is from the public calling in when they see the vehicle.”

The AMBER Alerts have proven to be helpful in not just Washington State, but all around the country, according to Gordon. Although these have proven to solve most of these cases, some require other measures to bring the child home safely.

“If you have a large body of water and the per-son happens to be last seen somewhere around there, you can call in harbor units. We have a helicopter with the county; we can use anything from cadaver dogs to search dogs. It is case specific,” says Nelson.

An extreme resource that Arbuthnol-Stohl says the FBI can offer departments in these extreme cases is the Child Abduction Rapid Deployment team (CARD).

“CARD is made up of members of all the 50 to 60 field offices. They are an on-call team that if a child is missing and it is determined that child is endangered … the CARD team is deployed,” says Arbuthnol-Stohl. “They pull people from the team all over the country to go to one location and offer our services.”

Child abductions are a rare circumstance according to Arbuthnol-Stohl and Nelson. “Talking about children is a difficult thing. If you are talking about at-risk children, either with disabilities or because they are very young, we do not have a lot. I know it is a subjective term, but it is just the truth. We do not get kids going missing every day,” says Nelson.

Although child abductions are a rare occurrence, that does not hinder the response by local and federal law enforcement.

Endangered Runaways

While child abductions are rare and ending quicker due to preventative measures, runaways provide a different story than missing children.

“I would say that most of the active missing persons cases are children, as in they are under 18, but that also counts runaway youth, teenage youth that run away and they outnumber the other cases by far in the state’s system,” says Gordon.

Once again, there are a number of different circumstances that affect how investigating a runaway might look. According to Nelson, many of the runaways in Seattle come from minors fleeing youth centers.

Leslie Briner, consultant for YouthCare, a youth homelessness support network, shares what the protocol looks like when a child flees from care. “By state law (referred to as the Revised Code of Washington or RSW) youth must be reported to police and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children after running away from any placement (youth center or foster home),” says Briner.

Briner attributes the many factors that may influence a child to run away as the “push and pull factors.”

Push factors come from within the home or environment, such as abuse or neglect that ‘push’ the child out of the environment, according to Briner. Pull factors are the opposite, where some-thing from outside the home, such as traffickers or peers, is causing the child to run away.

These runaways may face a variety of dangerous hardships when no longer receiving their necessary care.

Briner says, “They are vulnerable to a wide array of harm and exploitation. They quickly developed adult-oriented skills and thinking, still with a young person’s mind and experience.”

According to the Child Welfare Information Gateway, of the total 442,995 children in the foster care system in 2017, 1% had run away.

“Maybe that child is going to run because they are not used to being in the [foster] system or they do not want to be away from their parents or legal guardian that they were taken from,” says Arbuthnol-Stohl.

“I think ‘runaways’ get painted as impulsive, bad or reckless,” says Briner. “They are doing their best, in very difficult conditions. They de-serve our respect, care and support.

Missing in Seattle

Seattle is a city that provides a unique perspective on missing persons cases. According to Nelson, the amount of people coming and leaving Seattle influences many of the missing persons calls that come through.

“They get reported missing where they were last verified to be. So we get missing persons re-ported from outside the city all of the time, even outside of the state,” says Nelson.

To make matters harder for the Seattle Police Department, Nelson states that the missing per-sons detail is understaffed. “When I first took over a few years ago I actually checked with other agencies and for a city of our size is probably six [officers] and the minimum we step out next to us is four,” says Nelson.

With the heavy transient population and the amount of youth centers in the area, the majority of missing children that Nelson investigates are either out of town or youth runaways.

“I have two detectives doing the work of four detectives and we have a couple of facilities here with a few frequent fliers [runaways] and be-cause they are essentially wards of the state, there is mandatory reporting if they turn up missing and it creates a huge workload, that’s paperwork,” says Nelson.

With so many runaway children in the Washington State database, Nelson speculates that this can potentially cause a number of issues.

“All of our missing persons reports are sup-posed to be with them in 24 hours and once they get the report, they all get put into a database, so anytime a runaway turns up missing you get a ripple effect that we are going to start packing Washington State Patrol Databases with all sorts of missing people that are not missing as much as other people are missing, for lack of a better term,” says Nelson.

Although Seattle poses its own issues that other cities may not face, Nelson is still thankful that the Seattle Police Department has been successful in bringing missing children home.

“We have been fortunate to take true miss-ing persons very seriously. We have been very successful when a child does not show up from coming home from school or a confrontation with their parents,” says Nelson.

What You Can Do

There are a number of ways in which the public can get involved in solving and preventing abductions and missing children cases.

“More than anything, it is making sure that if the worst happens that parents and caregivers call the police and not feel like they are inconveniencing people,” says Arbuthnol-Stohl. “We would much rather have them call and it be wrong, and the child be safe … than to have the worst actually occur.”

The NCMEC offers a number of resources for families dealing with the emotional turmoil of having a missing child. “We have a Family Advocacy Division that helps families with the emotional impact of having a missing or sexually exploited child and with the reunification when they are recovered,” says Bischoff.

The prevention of missing children cases is a task that any member of the public can take on.

Bischoff finalizes, “At NCMEC, we know that all it takes is one person to pay attention, do the right thing and help bring a missing child home.”