How can you go from looking like this:
To this the day of your release:
And all the police can say is this:
“She exhibited no signs of mental illness or intoxication. She was fine. She’s an adult.”
And at 1:25am on a road unfamiliar to her and that is not served by buses?! Somebody find this child. Now.
Family Website:
Police investigators and family are asking for the public’s help in finding a 24-year-old Cal State Fullerton graduate who was last seen leaving a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s substation near Malibu early Thursday morning.
Mitrice Richardson, of Los Angeles, was released from the Malibu/Lost Hills substation in the 2700 block of Agoura Road at about 1 a.m. Thursday, about five hours after she was arrested on suspicion of failing to pay for dinner and on suspicion of being in possession of less than one ounce of marijuana, said Los Angeles sheriff’s spokesman Steve Whitmore.
Richardson is described as African American with brown hair and brown eyes. She is about 5 feet 5 inches tall and about 135 pounds. She was last seen wearing a dark shirt and blue jeans.
Her mother, Latice Sutton, said her daughter went alone to Geoffrey’s Malibu restaurant on Wednesday and ordered a steak dinner and a drink, but had no money to pay the $89 bill.
“My grandmother offered to pay for the bill over the phone, but they refused because their policy requires a signature,” Sutton said.
When Sutton called the restaurant, she was told her daughter was “not in any frame of mind to drive.”
“I told him that was odd because she is not a big drinker. She is usually the designated driver,” Sutton said.
Richardson was arrested about 8:30 p.m. Wednesday after she failed to pay the bill at the restaurant at 27400 Pacific Coast Highway, authorities said. Her white 1990 Honda Civic was impounded.
Sutton said she found out over the phone that her daughter was going to be booked at the Sheriff’s Malibu/Lost Hills substation. When she called the substation, she was told her daughter was en route.
“The deputy said ‘We will usually keep them until the morning hours’ and said he didn’t know her bail because she was not processed,’”
“Perhaps I should not have assumed morning time meant daylight,” she said.
Sutton said she doesn’t understand why deputies would release her daughter in the dark when she had no identification, no money, no cell phone and was unfamiliar with the area.
“She refused to stay overnight,” Whitmore, the sheriff’s spokesman, said. “We had no reason to hold her because she did not exhibit signs of mental illness or intoxication,” he said, adding that Richardson signed several release forms and made a couple of calls.
Sutton now believes her daughter was in a manic state of mind because she had been sending “erratic” texts to friends and family earlier in the day.
Her worry was elevated when she saw her daughter’s booking photo. “She looks frightening. She doesn’t have the bright look she normally demonstrates,” Sutton said.
And now Sutton questions the sheriff’s handling of her daughter’s situation.
“As much as I hate to say this, I truly have to question if she was Caucasian, would they have put policy and procedure over safety?” she said. “Their apathy in handling this case further confirms she was just a black girl in an area she shouldn’t have been in. That is the attitude that they carry.”
Richardson’s family filed a missing persons report with the Los Angeles Police Department. Family and friends have embarked on a search to find Richardson since she vanished.
“I have to find my baby,” her mother said. “She is full of energy. When she walks into a room she is a burst of energy.”
Richardson graduated from Cal State Fullerton in 2008 with a degree in psychology. She was a resident assistant on campus until 2007 and then moved to South Central Los Angeles with her great-grandmother.
Richardson was a Miss Fullerton contestant in 2007. Her talent was dance.
Authorities carried out a search on Saturday in a residential neighborhood off Piuma and Woodbluff roads, which is about five miles from the sheriff’s substation, said LAPD Det. Kristin Merrill.
Merrill said the search was fruitless and there is nothing to indicate foul play.
Police are asking anyone with information about her whereabouts or anyone who was at Geoffrey’s Malibu on Wednesday night to call the LAPD’s Missing Persons Unit at 213-485-5381 or 1-877-LAPD-24-7.
Investigators are trying to determine whether a sweatshirt that volunteer searchers found Sunday is that of a missing California boy with cerebral palsy, Oakland police said.
Volunteers looking for 5-year-old Hasanni Campbell found a small gray sweatshirt partially buried Sunday afternoon off a cul-de-sac near an Oakland neighborhood where his foster parents reported he had disappeared last month, CNN affiliate KTVU reported, citing Oakland police.
Hasanni was said to have been wearing a gray sweatshirt on August 10, the day his foster father reported him missing, CNN affiliate KGO reported.
“Because [the sweatshirt found Sunday] is similar, it’s gray, it does appear to be small … and this is pretty close to the area where he was missing, we want to make sure that we analyze it and confirm,” Oakland police Sgt. Arturo Bautista told reporters at the discovery site Sunday. Watch searchers pray after finding shirt »
Hasanni’s foster parents, Louis Ross and Jennifer Campbell, told police Hasanni disappeared while Ross was dropping him off at a shoe store where Campbell worked.
Less than a month later, Oakland police said they were treating the disappearance as a homicide, and arrested Ross and Campbell — who also is Hasanni’s biological aunt — on Aug. 28 as suspects. However, both were released a few days later after the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office concluded there was insufficient evidence to charge them, Deputy District Attorney Tom Rogers said on September 1.
Police haven’t said why the case had become a homicide investigation. A body has not been found.
Ross and Campbell, who are engaged, have maintained their innocence.
In an interview last month with HLN’s Nancy Grace, Ross said he left Hasanni outside his BMW for two to five minutes while he went to get his fiancee to open the back door of the store.
“By the time I got there, Jennifer is already out of the store, walking toward me, asking, ‘Where is Hasanni?’ And I say, ‘What do you mean, where is Hasanni?’ And I look around to the side, and he is no longer there.”
Greenville police are asking for the public’s help to locate a 15-year-old girl last seen a week ago.
Trenae Monique Johnson, described as a black female, 5 feet 2 inches tall and weighing 140 pounds, was last seen Sept. 4 when she left home wearing a burgundy polo shirt and black pants, her school uniform, according to a news release.
Johnson, who lives at 3804-C2 Sterling Pointe Drive, Winterville, is a student at South Central High School.
The release stated Johnson “has a background with behavioral problems which may suggest a runaway.” It also said she could be in the Farmville area.
Police say anyone who has information about Johnson’s location should contact her mother, Shanna Denise Johnson, at (443) 455-9095.
If you never heard of this, I don’t blame you. It doesn’t quite fit the profile of “Important News You Need To Know” apparently…I wonder why? Take a wild guess.
A 49-year-old man suspected in the killings of at least eight women over 21 years in Milwaukee has been charged in connection with two of the homicides, authorities announced Monday.
Walter E. Ellis of Milwaukee faces two counts of first-degree intentional homicide in the killings of Joyce Mims, 41, and Ouithreaun Stokes, 28, who were strangled a decade apart.
Ellis was arrested around noon Saturday at a motel in Franklin, one day after authorities linked DNA from his toothbrush with samples found on Mims’ and Stokes’ bodies, according to a criminal complaint.
Ellis could be charged this week in connection with some of the other killings, Milwaukee County District Attorney John T. Chisholm said.
Until a news conference Monday, police had not said publicly that Ellis had been linked to the 1992 killing of Irene Smith, 25, and the 1994 murder of Carron D. Kilpatrick, 32, whose bodies were found within a block of each other.
Both women were strangled and stabbed, police spokeswoman Anne E. Schwartz said. Their murders were linked to Ellis’ DNA in the past two weeks, Milwaukee Police Chief Edward A. Flynn said.
Ellis’ DNA has been found on at least nine females killed between 1986 and 2007, Flynn said. Police officials have said they think someone else killed one of those victims, a white 16-year-old runaway whose throat was slashed. The other victims, all prostitutes and African-American, were strangled. And at least two were also stabbed.
The killings occurred in an area roughly bounded by N. King Drive, N. 27th St., W. North Ave. and W. Capitol Drive. One victim was found in the Menomonee River, but authorities believe she was killed elsewhere.
In two of the homicides linked to Ellis, other men had been charged in the slayings. Curtis McCoy was charged in October 1994 with killing Kilpatrick, his live-in girlfriend and the mother of his daughter, but he was later acquitted by a jury. Chaunte Ott was convicted of killing Jessica Payne, the 16-year-old runaway. Ott served 13 years in prison before he was released in January, after DNA analysis showed semen found on the girl’s body was not his.
Authorities announced the link to a suspected serial killer in May after tests revealed DNA from the same person had been left at six homicide scenes dating from 1986 to 2007.
A task force of local, state and federal law enforcement officials dedicated to investigating the linked homicides received 193 tips in its first three months of operation, Flynn said last month. Some suspects were interviewed and ruled out, he said.
Investigators had run the DNA profile found on the murdered women against DNA databases nationally but did not get any hits. That meant the suspect was not in prison and had not provided law enforcement with a genetic sample in any state. Since 2000, Wisconsin has required all felons to provide DNA.
Investigators began to focus on Ellis after his name surfaced in connection with a number of unsolved homicides, Flynn said.
“Good police work and good police science have led us to Walter Ellis,” Flynn said Monday.
Ellis was not home when police executed a search warrant at his duplex apartment in the 2800 block of W. Bobolink Ave. on Aug. 29, officials said Monday. Police took Ellis’ toothbrush and razors, according to the complaint against him.
Tests conducted on the toothbrush at the State Crime Laboratory showed that the DNA found on Mims and Stokes belonged to Ellis, the complaint says.
A warrant for Ellis’ arrest was issued Friday, and Milwaukee police sent out an alert notifying other police agencies of the vehicle Ellis was believed to be driving, Flynn said.
On Saturday, Franklin Police Officer Jason Fincel spotted the vehicle at the Park Motel, 7273 S. 27th St. in Franklin, Flynn said. A swarm of police officers descended on the motel. Ellis, who was not armed, was arrested after a struggle, Flynn said.
A woman living in the downstairs apartment at Ellis’ duplex said she learned of his arrest over the weekend but was not certain of the reason until contacted by the Journal Sentinel.
“He didn’t seem like that type of person,” said the woman, who did not want to be identified. “It’s so scary now. I could have been a victim. I’m shaking right now.”
She saw Ellis and a woman who lived with him nearly every day but did not know much about them, she said.
Ellis never caused a disturbance during the several months that he lived there, the woman said. The block of W. Bobolink Ave. contains a mix of duplexes and single family residences.
Ellis was criminally charged 12 times between 1981 and 1998 for violent and property crimes, according to online court records. Flynn noted that although all felons incarcerated in Wisconsin have had to submit DNA samples, Ellis was last convicted of a felony in 1998, two years before the samples were required.
Ellis was sentenced to five years in prison for recklessly endangering safety, according to court records. Further details of that case were not available. Of the nine victims who have been linked to Ellis, none was killed between 1998 and 2006.
Online records show Ellis was released from federal prison in 1992. Details about that case were not available.
Court records show that Ellis lived for a time near N. 6th and W. Chambers streets, within a few blocks of most of the killings.
Relatives of Mims said she lived a few blocks from Ellis and was dating Ellis’ uncle when she was killed.
“He just seemed like a regular guy,” Mims’ son, Purvis Mims, said of Ellis. “It goes to show you never know what’s going on behind closed doors.”
Purvis Mims said he did not know Ellis well but had met him about six times before his mother was killed.
Joyce Mims “probably knew him much better than we did,” Purvis Mims said. “I always thought that she did know the (killer), because of the environment they found her in. I know she wouldn’t have gone in an abandoned house with a stranger, regardless of the circumstances. She probably had a rapport of some fashion with him.”
Mims, 30, said he was always optimistic that his mother’s killer would be found, especially after authorities announced the DNA link earlier this year.
“I was pretty confident because a person who does those types of things, they don’t stop,” he said. “You don’t just never do it again or never have any police interaction.”
Joyce Mims’ sister, Tara Noble, said Ellis’ name did not sound familiar, but she said she was eager to view his photo to see if she recognized him.
Flynn on Monday requested that the media not make public Ellis’ photo because investigators were still showing it to possible witnesses.
“I’m glad they got this man, because I just feel sorry for what my sister went through,” Noble said. “We just think about how she was killed . . . My sister was found beaten and strangled. Those are words you don’t ever want to tell somebody.”
The massive investigation into the killings linked by Ellis’ DNA, which included retesting of DNA samples from dozens of unsolved murders, led to hits in at least 10 unrelated cases.
Suspects since have been charged in two of those cases.
David W. Lewis, 47, was charged in June with first-degree reckless homicide in connection with the 1990 strangulation of 45-year-old Vernell Jeter.
William W. Phillips, 37, was charged this month with first-degree intentional homicide in connection with the 1990 death of 26-year-old Rhonda Hartwright, who was killed by a shotgun blast to her face.
Prosecutors expect to file charges in a third cold case soon, Chisholm said last month.Police have identified suspects in five other homicides that occurred in Milwaukee from 1983 to 1994, Flynn said last month. Four of those suspects are already incarcerated in connection with other crimes, he said.
Finally, investigators have developed DNA profiles of suspects in two other unsolved killings but have not been able to match the DNA with suspects, Chisholm said last month.
Are you kidding me? One and a half year later they finally admit it?! Who knows what happened to her in that time? This is why it’s important to NOT pay any mind to the “runaway” title that police so desperately want to label our youth. PLEASE share this story!
The Chicago Police Department’s Internal Affairs Division acknowledged on Thursday it mishandled a missing person case.
Yasmine Acree vanished on January 15, 2008. The then 15-year-old girl was reported missing from her home at Congress and Cicero by family members. The family said Yasmine went to bed in the basement of the home where her room was, but was not seen the next day. Police classified her as a runaway, but her family insisted at the time she would never do that.
Today, her family held a news conference at Chicago Police Headquarters. There, they expressed disappointment that the police hadn’t performed their job thoroughly. They argued the police did a poor job of collecting evidence, and checked-out the scene too late.
The family will try to meet with Police Supt. Jody Weis perhaps as soon as this weekend.
Yasmine Acree is 5-feet-1 and weighs 125 pounds. She has black hair and brown eyes. Family members are asking anyone with information about Yasmine to call Area 5 Missing Persons at 312/746-6399
Montgomery County Police are searching for a 14-year-old girl who has been missing since last Friday.
Eboni Dayshana Patterson of the 19800 block of Wheelright Drive in Gaithersburg has been missing since September 4.
She is known to frequent the areas of Silver Spring and Takoma Park, as well as areas in D.C. and Prince George’s County.
Patterson is described as a black female, 5 feet, 7 inches tall, weighing 215 pounds. She has brown eyes and short, black hair.
Anyone with any information on Patterson’s whereabouts is asked to call the Montgomery County Police non-emergency number at 301-279-8000 or the Family Crimes division at 240-773-5400.
A 15-year-old Shreveporter is suspected by family members of running away from home Wednesday, and she has not been seen since, according to Shreveport police, who are looking for the girl.
Carmesha Bates is described as black, standing 5 feet, 4 inches tall and weighing 110pounds, according to a police department news release. She was last seen wearing a white polo-style shirt, khaki pants and black shoes.
It was not immediately known where she was last seen or what led family members to believe she’d left on her own accord.
Call Shreveport police detective Cpl. Jimmy Ray at (318) 673-7020 or Shreveport-Caddo Crime Stoppers at (318) 673-7373 with information about Bates’ whereabouts.
This article was written a few years ago, but it needs to be published and republished again for emphasis. Pay close attention to the part that I quoted and italized. And PLEASE PLEASE, pass this article along. I know this issue is being slept on, and it’s up to us to revive it again.
For a missing child to attract widespread publicity and improve the odds of being found, it helps if the child is white, wealthy, cute and under 12.
Experts agree that whites account for only half of the nation’s missing children. But white children were the subjects of more than two-thirds of the dispatches appearing on the Associated Press’ national wire during the last five years and for three-quarters of missing-children coverage on CNN, according to a first-of-its-kind study by Scripps Howard News Service.
“I don’t think this results from conscious or subconscious racism,” said Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. “But there’s no question that if a case resonates, if it touches the heartstrings, if it makes people think ‘that could be my child,’ then it’s likely to pass the test to be considered newsworthy. Does that skew in favor of white kids? Yes, it probably does.”
That race and class affect news coverage is a fact that’s not lost on the families of missing minority children.
“But the thing about it, the ghetto mamas love their babies just like the rich people do. And they need to recognize that,” Mattie Mitchell said of news executives.
Mitchell is the great-grandmother of missing 4-year-old Jaquilla Scales. Jaquilla, who is black and has never been found, drew only slight national coverage in 2001 when she was snatched from her bedroom in Wichita, Kan. But the bedroom kidnappings of Danielle van Dam, Polly Klaas, Jessica Lunsford and Elizabeth Smart, all white girls, erupted in a barrage of publicity.
“They could have done more,” Jaquilla’s mother, Eureka Scales, said of national news organizations. “They could have put more out there so people could know.”
Media coverage of missing children has an even stronger age bias. Children less than 12 represented only a sixth of all cases reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in the last five years. But they accounted for more than two-thirds of national news stories in the study.
“It hasn’t been proven, but there’s a cuteness factor, I think,” said Mitch Oldham of the National Runaway Switchboard. “Why do people like pandas more than condors? They’re more cuddly. I won’t say it’s a callousness towards older children. But younger children are perceived to be more vulnerable.”
Scripps Howard studied 162 missing-children cases reported by the Associated Press from Jan. 1, 2000, through Dec. 31, 2004. Forty-three CNN reports were also studied. Scripps Howard determined the race of the child in each case by checking records maintained by missing-children organizations or by contacting police investigators.
White children accounted for 67 percent of AP’s missing-children coverage and for 76 percent of CNN’s. But they represented only 53 percent of the 37,665 cases reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children during the same period and only 54 percent of the cases found in a 2002 study of missing children sponsored by the U.S. Justice Department.
Black children accounted for 17 percent of the AP stories, 13 percent of CNN’s, 19 percent in the Justice Department’s study and 23 percent of cases reported to the National Center.
The discrepancies for Hispanic children were greater, accounting for just 11 percent of AP’s reporting and 9 percent of CNN’s stories, yet 18 percent of children reported to the National Center and 21 percent in the Justice Department study.
“I think there are explanations other than that black kids and Hispanic kids are not objects of concern or compassion,” said sociologist David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire and author of the Justice Department’s 2002 study.
“Middle-class white families have good social networks and are able to mobilize people better, making it a matter of communitywide attention. But minority parents may not see the media as a likely source of help,” he said.
Executives at CNN headquarters in Atlanta refused to comment on the study.
Associated Press Managing Editor Mike Silverman, however, said his staff “has certainly talked and thought a lot about what kinds of cases are getting media attention.” He said racial and age disparities in missing-children reporting may be smaller when looking at community news covered by an individual newspaper or television station.
“The issue of age has a fairly simple explanation,” Silverman said. “Teenage runaways simply are not national news in the same way as are abductions, particularly abductions by strangers. More people in more places are going to be interested when a smaller child is at peril.”
Parents of missing minority children and several national advocacy groups complain that missing teenagers face a presumption that they’ve run away. “Minority families probably have a harder time overcoming this runaway hypothesis,” Finkelhor said.
A good example is the 2002 abduction of Laura Ayala, 13, who disappeared after walking a block from her Houston home to buy a newspaper for her mother. Police found only the newspaper and the Hispanic teenager’s shoes in a nearby parking lot.
“The police said that maybe she left with her boyfriend,” said Laura’s mother, Angelica Rebollar. “I felt desperate. I knew something was wrong. I knew she didn’t have a boyfriend.”
Allen and other staff workers at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children tried to persuade Texas newspapers and radio and television stations to cover the disappearance in hopes that an alert public might help locate the teen.
“I made dozens of phone calls,” Allen said. “But we were told, ‘Oh, she probably just ran away.’ My response was: ‘Without her shoes?’ The presumption by media in cases of a 12- or 13-year-old is that this is a runaway. End of story.”
Laura was never located. But Houston police made a full investigation and now believe she was abducted and killed by a man on Texas’ death row for another crime. Her story, after considerable prompting, was picked up by CNN and the regional AP wire and was featured prominently on the Univision national Hispanic cable TV network.
But Rebollar said she believes her daughter would have been located if police and the press had acted more quickly. “I felt I was treated differently because I’m Hispanic, without a lot of money,” she said.
Missing-children advocates say publicity can save lives. Amber Alerts on local radio and television broadcasts, for example, have helped recover hundreds of children in the last seven years. National media attention can be even more powerful, especially in cases where police fear a kidnapper has crossed state lines with a child.
“We hope that news directors, editors and media decision-makers will begin to view this from the perspective of public service,” Allen said. “The reality is that media works. When we can bring attention, we can mobilize the eyes and ears of the American public, we dramatically increase the likelihood that the child is going to be found safely.”
News executives have long considered how minorities, especially disadvantaged minorities, are treated, Silverman said. “My hunch is that socioeconomics has a lot to do with this. Affluent parents have the wherewithal to use the system better,” he said.
Ivan Roman, executive director of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, agreed.
“This is a class problem, a sign of how the media value the concerns of white, middle-class people,” Roman said. “We used to have the so-called ‘good address’ syndrome. When a crime occurred in a middle-class neighborhood, it got coverage. That same mentality continues to play out.”
But there can be other, more subtle factors at work. Allen said it is much harder to gain media attention for missing children in major urban areas where much of America’s minority population lives.
“A few years ago in New York City, we had two beautiful 2-year-old African-American boys who disappeared within a few months of each other from the same playground across the street from the same apartment house where they both lived,” Allen said. “Media coverage could really have helped here. But we were told by media executives: ‘It’s New York. These kind of things happen in big cities.’ “
Media attention is easier to obtain in smaller communities, which tend to have predominately white populations, Allen said. “Missing children get the most attention in rural areas and small towns, places where people think these kinds of things don’t happen,” he said.
Scripps Howard examined media reports on AP and CNN from 2000 through 2004, a period selected so that comparisons could be made to data provided by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children during these same years. The Associated Press is the largest producer of print news in the United States, providing more national stories than any other source. CNN was selected because it was the largest provider of national television reporting during this period.
Experts warn that patterns found in this study are indicative of reporting practices throughout the nation’s news media. “This certainly crosses the entire media spectrum and is not unique to just CNN or the AP,” Allen said.
This study also examined missing-children stories carried by Scripps Howard News Service. Using the same methods employed to study the Associated Press, only four missing-children cases were carried from 2000 to 2004. Two of these were white children, one was black and one was biracial.
Police in Trotwood said they have found a 4-year-old boy and his father after an Amber Alert was issued late Friday afternoon.
Jourdan Keel, 4, is a black male who was last seen with his father on Thursday. Keel was found safe and unharmed at a home in the 1600 block of Superior Avenue in Dayton.
The father was identified as William T. Keel, of Trotwood. Police said he is a recovering drug addict.
Police said they have arrested William Keel and taken him into custody. News Center 7 was on the scene and spoke with the boy’s father who said he did not know that anyone was looking for him.
According to police, the vehicle that law enforcement had been looking for, a 2002 burgundy Chrysler Town and County minivan, was found on Salem and Hillcrest Avenues in Dayton.
Police received information from people who were still in the van that the child and his father were in an apartment on Superior Avenue. Dayton police said officers had to force their way into the home and when they entered, there was a strong odor of marijuana and someone in the apartment was cited for possession of marijuana.
According to reports, the child’s mother spoke to William Keel about 5 p.m. on Thursday and he said he was headed home.
Investigators said they were concerned about Jourdan’s safety because he needs medication three times a day for cerebral palsy and several other medical problems.
Jourdan was found in good health, and he told police he was scared and hungry, but did not want chicken nuggets.
