By John Riley – former contributing author for Crime, Justice and America magazine. Originally published in 2003 and reposted with permission from Crime, Justice and America magazine
Kieran A. Murphy, 59, was last seen Dec. 14, 2001 in San Francisco. A sailing vessel owned by him and his wife, Ornaith, who also is missing, disappeared from its berth at Oakland’s Jack London Square on Dec. 15, 2001.
San Francisco police consider the 5-foot, 11-inch white male with gray hair and brown eyes to be a “voluntary missing adult.”
Mohammed Ata Hakimi, 28, also is considered to be voluntarily missing. The 5-foot, 7-inche, 169-pound male with black hair and brown eyes was last seen in March, 2002, in Fresno.
Hakimi was known to wear diamond-studded earrings in both ears, to have a tattoo of a dollar sign on his neck and of a terrorist and a gun on his back. His 1990 red Porsche was found abandoned in the city of Valencia north of Los Angeles.
The circumstances surrounding the disappearance of 29-year-old Diana Raquel Rojas are unknown.
The 5-foot, 2-inch, 127-pound Hispanic female was last seen on Oct. 21, 2000, at her home in Long Beach. Her vehicle, a black 1992 Nissan extended cab pickup truck with Texas plates (license number BY3242, is also missing.
According to a 2002 report from the National Crime Information Center, there are approximately 40,000 active missing adult cases throughout the United States.
While the figure is far below that of missing children, which numbers in the hundreds of thousands, it is still a statistic that is alarming enough to motivate the Justice Department in Washington D.C. to award a $1.75 million grant to create a national clearinghouse for information on missing adults, similar to one that exists for children.
The legislation authorizing the clearinghouse (called Kristen’s Law) was inspired by missing North Carolina State University student Kristen Modafferi, who was last seen during the summer of 1997 in San Francisco. She disappeared just three weeks after her 18th birthday.
Under the law in existence at the time of Modafferi’s disappearance, organizations that help search for missing children were unable to assist Modafferi’s parents because she was an adult.
The disappearance of the young woman from Charlotte was the subject of nationwide publicity, but thousands of other cases involving adults are reported to authorities without generating headlines.
“These funds will provide desperately needed assistance to law enforcement and families looking for missing adults,” said Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., Senate sponsor of the bill. “Kristen’s Law will help ensure than when an adult of any age is missing due to foul play a national effort will be mobilized to help.”
Rep. Sue Myrick, R-N.C., House sponsor of the bill, said, “When (Kristen’s) panicked parents called the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, they heard the unbelievable words, `I am sorry, we cannot help you.’
“They were shocked to discover that because Kristen was 18, the center could not place her picture and story into its national database, or offer any assistance whatsoever.”
“Kristen’s 18th birthday was only three weeks before she disappeared,” said Rep. Nicholas Lampson, D-Texas, chairman and founder of the Congressional Caucus for Missing and Exploited Children.
“A congressionally authorized clearinghouse for missing adults is necessary to assist people like Kristen’s parents,” he said. “I do not want to look into the faces of anymore parents whose grown-up children are missing or someplace where they should not be. The tragedy is too difficult to deal with.”
The bill also directs the U.S. Attorney General to issue grants to public agencies or nonprofit private organizations so they can assist in locating the missing grownups.
The $1.75-million appropriation was awarded to the Nation’s Missing Children Organization and Center for Missing Adults.
The Phoenix-based organization was founded in 1994 by 37-year-old Kym Pasqualini. The nonprofit group works to prevent abductions and to help families of abduction victims across the country. It distributes photographs of missing people and works with law enforcement agencies to help find missing people.
The legislation not only authorized the creation of a national clearinghouse for missing adults but it also sets up a national database for tracking missing adults who are in danger because of their age or diminished mental capacity or when foul play is suspected.
This is the first funding released under Kristen’s Law. In a recent interview with Crime, Justice and America, Pasqualini said the numbers of missing adults are on the rise and more must be done to locate them.
“Whether a missing person is an adult or a child, he or she is not merely a statistic to that person’s family.”
Pasqualini carries with her the trauma of almost being a missing person herself. When she was 8 years old, living in Sonora, Calif., she was walking home from school with friends when a man sitting in a red pickup truck holding a knife in one hand tried to pull her inside with the other hand.
“I was with two other little girls about a quarter of a mile out in the country,” recalled Pasqualini. “We were not educated (about abductions) back then. We didn’t know anything about stranger abductions.”
Pasqualini managed to pull away from the stranger and run. She ran for years from the mental and emotional trauma – but she could not escape, and eventually dedicated her life to finding missing people, young and old.
Today, she is President of the Phoenix chapter of the Nation’s Missing Children Organization, one of 29 similar organizations around the nation recognized by the U.S. Department of Justices’ Missing and Exploited Children agency.
“My near abduction has haunted me to this day,” Pasqualini said.
NCMEC serves as a focal point in providing assistance to parents, children, law enforcement, schools and the community in recovering missing children – and now missing adults.
Complicating the missing-adult issues is the fact that adults have the right to disappear, in most cases, if they want.
Pasqualini notes that adults can come and go as they please, which sometimes contributes to differences in the way law enforcement agencies handle reports of missing adults and children.
She says differences include the way the cases themselves are handled, the attention they get and the way statistics are reported.
According to the FBI, more than 42,000 adults are missing in this country, including more than 11,000 between ages 18 and 21 and more than 6,000 between the ages of 22 and 29.
Pasqualini’s agency is not along in its concern for missing adults. In July, 2000, Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee issued a proclamation designating Aug. 5 as Missing Adult Awareness Day. It became the first state to officially recognize the problem.
In August, 2001, a group of Arkansas citizens announced they were forming the non-profit organization, the National Center for Endangered Missing Adults (NCEMA). The organization is the first in the country to exclusively represent missing adults and their families.
The members of the organization were instrumental in developing Arkansas legislation governing missing adults. Their intent is to offer services for endangered and involuntarily missing adults throughout the United States.
The ultimate goal of the organization is to provide the same quality of standards in assistance and resources for missing adults that is currently available for locating and recovering missing children.
The majority of missing adult cases, say the group’s founders, are unrecognized and unrepresented. The growing groups of victims range in age from young adults to senior citizens, and reach across all walks of life.
The organization seeks to improve the attention given to missing adults by heightening the awareness and offering assistance to the searching families and to law enforcement agencies.
An on-line searchable database now under constriction will be designed and made available to the public and law enforcement agencies, say organizers. Families may submit information to NCEMA as soon as a report has been filed with a law enforcement agency. The information will be kept in the database until the case is resolved.
The organization will act as a liaison between families, law enforcement agencies and the media in an effort to ease the burden and lessen confusion, which will allow all concerned to clearly focus on the search and investigation.
Future plans include developing public educational programs and onsite training for law enforcement agencies in tracking, investigative techniques and procedures that are unique to missing adult cases. Help will also be available in the construction and distribution of missing person flyers.
The legal process of forming the organization was initiated on March 2, 2001. The organization received tax-exempt status from the Internal Revenue Service. NCEA is actively seeking grants and contributions to establish and begin operation.
The organization’s address is: National Center for Endangered Missing Adults, P.O. Box 511, Searcy, Ark. 72145-0511.
The California Department of Justice Missing and Unidentified Persons Section assists law enforcement and criminal justice agencies in locating missing persons and identifying unknown live and deceased persons.
There is no waiting period in California to report a missing person. All California police and sheriff’s departments will accept any report, including any telephone report, of a missing person, including runaways, without delay.
Officials explain that in California a missing person is defined as an individual whose whereabouts are unknown to the reporting party and includes, but is not limited to, any child who is missing voluntarily or involuntarily, or under circumstances not conforming to his or her ordinary habits or behavior and who may be in need of assistance.
It also includes a child taken, detained, concealed, enticed away, or retained by a parent or non-parent family member.
The California DOJ’s Internet site (http://caag.state.ca.us/) allows you to search the agency’s files of photographs of missing children and adults, and learn more about the services offered by the DOJ. This is not a complete listing of all missing persons in California, say officials.
The law enforcement database of missing persons averages around 26,000 active cases. Included are only those cases where law enforcement has submitted a photograph, and in accordance with laws and policies that meet the criteria for publishing.
To have a photograph added to the Internet site, family members of missing persons should submit their photographs to the law enforcement agency taking the missing person report.
DOJ is required by law to produce a monthly poster of missing children and a quarterly bulletin of missing children and dependent adults. On occasion, the DOJ produces special edition posters of missing adults.
The Missing Person Bulletin is of special value to schools, as the missing children are categorized by school level: preschool, primary and secondary. Individuals reported missing as juveniles that now would be age 18 or over are categorized as emancipated juveniles.
There are also sections for dependent adults and voluntary missing adults.
The Featured Unidentified section will be undergoing significant changes in the future, say officials. There are currently over 2,100 reports of unidentified persons in the DOJ automated database. Eventually, it will be providing photographs or drawings along with dental X-rays and fingerprint images of many of these cases.
Each year DOJ will update the statistics of missing person from entries and cancellations made by law enforcement into the Missing Persons System. This is an automated database available to authorized law enforcement and criminal justice agencies via the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System.
The DOJ also provide links to other official resources outside DOJ that provide assistance and education regarding missing persons.
The FBI is constantly updating its technology used to help locate missing persons, whether they are missing voluntarily or otherwise.
The latest update came in 2000, when the National Crime Information Center went online with a computerized data information system that cost in excess of $100 million.
Called NCIC 2000, the system is located at the FBI’s new facility in Clarksburg, W.Va.
The NCIC has been a critical law enforcement tool since 1967. The latest update in technology places it light years ahead of the equipment used 35 years ago.
The NCIC 2000 system contains many invaluable new features to serve the more than 80,000 criminal justice agencies throughout the nation. These features include single fingerprint matching and mug shots.
NCIC 2000 includes many technical enhancements over its predecessor. For example, law enforcement officials can,
using the NCIC 2000 single fingerprint imaging capabilities, receive positive identification of a wanted person in minutes.
NCIC 2000 system can process greater than 2.4 million transactions a day, with storage and access to over 39 million records.
Moreover, NCIC 2000 will continue to provide access and information to the law enforcement community on stolen vehicles, wanted persons, gangs, suspected terrorist and missing adults.
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