Natalee Holloway, Lacey Peterson, Elizabeth Smart. All of these girls have two things in common. They all went missing and the nation wondered what happened. Only one of these stories has a happy ending. Elizabeth Smart was found safe. For every Natalee Holloway and Lacey Peterson out there, there are thousands of missing people we never hear about. For some reason, they fail to grad headlines and tug on the nation’s heartstrings. They remain missing and forgotten by all but those who knew them. They stay missing for years, sometimes decades and nobody knows. Sometimes, they’re found and a family either mourns or rejoices, but there are no cameras poised to capture the reunion, no outpouring of grief, no nation sitting in stunned silence. These people go missing and stay missing in obscurity.
Some vanished before nationwide alerts were the norm. Some went missing when the nation’s attention was focused on other things. There are so many, it’s difficult for all of us to find out about each and every one. But, they all deserve the same attention and exposure as the ones who became household names. Some are children and some are adults. They too have a few things in common, they are missing and they are loved.
Jessie M. Griffin-Sebuliba age 7 months vanished this year from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He’s still missing. Travis Lee Baker of Taylorsville, North Carolina is missing too, he’s 19. 24 year-old Crystal L. Michalski vanished from Grand Island Nebraska. Belinda Hailey Oliver, age 19 is missing from Port Hueneme California. These are only a small example of the 88 missing people for the year 2007 as found on The Charley Project, a website dedicated to the missing (www.charleyproject.org). 88 people gone without a trace, how many of them have we heard of? How many of the dozens of other cases from this year made the headlines?
The Charley Project isn’t the only site dedicated to the missing. There’s The Doe Network(www.doenetwork.org), as site dedicated to the missing and the unidentified. Project Jason (www.projectjason.org) was founded by a mother who has been missing her son since June of 2001. These sites and others like them serve a great public good. They help get the word out about the missing and the unidentified. Project Jason offers assistance to the families of the missing at no charge. Volunteers from all walks of life spend countless hours of their time researching cases in the hopes of finding someone’s missing loved one. These people do what they do not for honor or fame, they do it out of the desire to ease the pain of others. These people are the heroes we never hear of.
Fate is even more fickle when it comes to unidentified bodies. Unless the case is riveting or the circumstances gruesome, we rarely hear about the John and Jane Does sitting in local morgues without names. A young man died along a stretch of Virginia highway in 1995, he still has no name. In September of 2001, a man checked himself into a hotel room in Gray’s Harbor Washington and hanged himself, he is still nameless. In a remote cemetery in Virginia, an older woman chose to end her life. Nobody knows who she was. The body of a small boy was discovered in a box near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the 1950’s. To this day, he has not been identified. These and many other John and Jane Doe cases remain unsolved. Some of these nameless people now rest in unmarked graves in Potter’s fields across the country. Others were cremated, their mortal remains are stored in the county morgue or the medical examiner’s office. Nobody should die without their name. Nobody should remain unidentified for decades. When we leave this world, we take only out names with us. Some people are stripped of even that. They are missed by somebody, but nobody knows who. They didn’t fall out of the sky in the spot where they were found.
In this age of information at our very fingertips, one would imagine it would be easy to find a missing person or give a name back to a Jane or John Doe. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Families are left to wonder where their loved ones are. They carry the pain with them long after the headlines of the most memorable have faded. There is no shelf-life on a tragedy. There is no time limit associated with the pain of not knowing. It is a pain that lingers with each passing day. It is a pain no amount of time will heal.
Take a moment from your busy day, if you will, and take a good look at any of the websites I’ve mentioned. You may see somebody you recognize. You may find yourself moved to care about a particular John or Jane Doe. You may want to help. You can, if you wish. All it takes is a desire to help others. If your only action is keeping a missing person in your thoughts, you’ve still gone miles in assuring that they are not forgotten.
