Marlaina Reed - Jane Doe No Longer

Marlaina "Nikki" Reed wasn't finished being a child. Marlaina was beaten to death – stuffed into a cardboard box and discarded with the trash in a north side Chicago alley. She was located on January 21, 2007 and had been deceased for several days. She was 17 years old.

The last missing person report for Marlaina said she was missing since May 5, 2006. It wasn't unusual – Marlaina ran away often – at least since she was 14. Marlaina was a ward of the state of Illinois, living in a group home on the city's north side. She was listed on the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's website as a missing child until the following year, May 2007. Just after her 18th birthday, she was removed from the site. Released from the jurisdiction of the state of Illinois when she reached 18, she was also removed from LEADS and NCIC by the Chicago police department. Perhaps this is department policy, perhaps it was an error, or perhaps it is an inherent flaw in a system that must protect the privacy of adults as well as the lives of children. Whatever the reason, Marlaina not only vanished in life, she vanished from the rolls of the missing and endangered. NCMEC, following federal privacy law guidelines, had to remove her case file when she was removed from NCIC. In fact, by the time her case files were purged from the databases, Marlaina had been lying in the Cook County Medical Examiner's office for 4 months, an unidentified Jane Doe.

God Bless the investigators with the Chicago Police Department who made the extraordinary effort to identify her. For the first time since 1980, the Cook County Medical Examiner's turned to forensic reconstruction to put a face to the young woman whose own face was disfigured by the beating she sustained, as well as decomposition. Forensic artist Karen Taylor did a remarkable job. That face was combined with the knowledge that the teen had once worn braces and sent to an Illinois Dental magazine, where, she was recognized by a Doctor and his nurse. Jane Doe now had a name and Marlaina was no longer missing.

Had Marlaina remained in NCIC and LEADS, perhaps closure to this case would have come sooner – perhaps not. But the fact that juveniles are considered 'missing' one day before they are 18 and no longer missing one day later is a huge crack in the system that is striving every day to bring investigative techniques and cutting edge technology into play to identify the thousands of unidentified John and Jane Does nationwide. Marlaina wasn't on anyone's radar. Even though she remained missing on my own site – I never made the connection to the Jane Doe – I didn't see the forest for the trees.

I am told that there is legislation on the books of several states that mandate that missing juveniles that turn 18 be transitioned to another database – as missing emancipated juveniles or missing adults. Missing children and missing adults are a nationwide problem. It is imperative that we centralize the data so that the missing and the unidentified can be compared on a national basis. We need federal legislation that mandates that these cases be carried over once a child attains the age of 18. I urge you to help me do this. Marlaina's life and death deserve more.

Valina McGhee - A Child Forgotten

Valina McGhee is missing. Google her name and you get zero hits. Searching the Chicago newspaper archives resulted in one mention - a 2001 article by Chicago Tribune news reporter, Kim Barker. Valina's disappearance was 3 sentences long in a story on Chicago's missing children:

And on June 28, 1989, Valina McGhee, 13, never came back to the South
Side home she shared with her mother. Her name and a few sketchy details linger
in the Chicago Police Department's files. But her disappearance never made it to
the news. She never made it into the state database of missing children, never
landed in the log of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children--an
oversight that police can't explain.

Ms. Barker went on to explain that, "Back then, the police and the public had just started changing their attitudes toward such cases, in large part due to efforts by John Walsh, whose son was kidnapped from a Florida shopping mall and murdered in 1981. His work launched the national clearinghouse for information on missing children."

The article that mentions Valina McGhee was written 20 years after the disappearance of Adam Walsh; seventeen years after the establishment of the NCMEC. The police couldn't explain how Valina was overlooked when the reporter did her story in 2001. Can they explain it now, another six years later? Valina is still not in NCMEC. She could be. "Better late than never" was the reply I received when I whined to Jerry Nance, Cold Case Manager at NCMEC.

I called around, trying to get someone to give me some details on Valina - maybe a picture forgotten in the meager file that remains in some storage box held by the Chicago Police....some stats, something....I couldn't get anyone to help me.

I want to add Valina to the cases of the too many missing on The Doe Network. I want to see her entered as a missing child into NCIC and NCMEC. I want Valina's family to know that we care - we care about Valina and we care about them. I'd like to ask them to contribute DNA to include in the national CODIS database for families of the missing - maybe Valina's DNA is already there.

I'm not bashing the Chicago police. I've had many good friends that were or still are among their ranks. I've met some wonderful men and women who go above and beyond in serving this city. They are overworked and understaffed and there are too many cases. But someone has let Valina down...for eighteen years. It's time we made up for that.

If she's alive, Valina is 31 years old. The chances are more likely that she is not...but if she is among the nameless dead we have no hope of finding her unless we recognize that she is among the missing. She is someone's child.

Remembering Sarah - Still Six Years Old

My good friend's daughter (my Godchild) had a baby last Sunday - a beautiful, healthy baby boy. Although my friends now live thousands of miles away, today's technology allowed me to see pictures of him and his proud grandparents on the same day he was welcomed into the world. Today's technology - what a wonderful thing.

The Internet allows us instant access to information in a way not possible 27 years ago, when six-year-old Sarah Elizabeth Avon disappeared from her family's front yard. The little girl was reported as missing from her family's home in Joliet, Illinois around 9:00 PM on July 21, 1981. Sarah and her sister, younger by a year, joined their friends where Richards Street ends. Sarah walked away after disagreeing with a young companion. She never returned home. She has never been seen since and there are few clues as to her whereabouts. She was 5 months younger than my son, and a 11 months older than my daughter.

Twelve years after Sarah vanished, Will County Sheriff's police began excavating property on the southeast side of Joliet in the hope of recovering the little girls remains. The search, based on a death-bed map drawn by the former property owner, was unsuccessful. The property owner's son, fifteen at the time of Sarah was abducted, implicated himself in her disappearance and death, according to his relatives, but he denied involvement when questioned by law enforcement. He has never been charged. Newspaper reports in 1993, at the time of the property search, indicated that the possible suspect was a "long time mental patient who now lives in California".

I hope California has been watching him. Really watching him.

Sarah Elizabeth Avon is forever trapped in time - a six-year-old child, playing on the streets on a hot summer night, when this was a different world. A world absent the media blitz that may have happened today, a world without an Amber Alert system, a world without the resources that may have helped bring thousands of people out to search, a world where we thought she would be safe on her own block.

Closure. Now there's a word. I don't know that Sarah's family would agree, but I don't believe they still are looking for closure after 27 years. I think that happened the day that they realized, truly accepted, that Sarah wasn't coming home. What they need is justice. Someone knows something, someone saw something on the hot July night. We must join her family in not forgetting Sarah. We're the only voice she still has, her only advocates. Even after 27 years, Sarah Elizabeth Avon is still six - she is someone's child - she is missing.

Summer in the City - Where is Mary Ann Switalski?

I was sitting in my home office, which conveniently faces the backyard so that I can watch my 5-year-old granddaughter in the yard as she plays, when the doorbell rang. It was a young male - probably college-aged, with that already perfected salesman grin on his face. I was already shaking my head no before he began his well-rehearsed sales pitch, prefaced, of course, of his need for college funds. In actuality I do subscribe to several magazines, but I refuse to purchase them from the door-to-door sales crews. Mary Ann Switalski has a lot to do with that decision.

It was the summer of '63, the Beatles were taking over Great Britain, and "I Want To Hold Your Hand" was becoming a smash hit, while the Safaris hit the music charts with the compelling instrumental 'Wipeout'. Fifteen thousand U.S. advisors were in Viet Nam, the U.S. Congress passed the 'equal pay for equal work' bill, New Hampshire previewed the first state-run lottery, and in the hazy days of that summer, no one could foresee the events that would forever change America come November 22nd, when President John F. Kennedy would be assassinated in Dallas.

On the evening of Sunday, July 15th, Mary Ann Switalski, age 16, headed out from her north side Chicago home to a local carnival, which was being held on the grounds of St. Priscilla Catholic Church. The carnival location was a little over a mile from the Cornelia Avenue home Mary Ann shared with her parents. On that balmy summer night, the pretty, petite, hazel-eyed blonde wore a black sleeveless blouse, white shorts and straw sandals. The temperature had reached a high of 81 earlier in the day, gradually dropping into the evening. By the time Mary Ann should have been walking home, the temperatures were downright chilly, as they headed toward a low of 57. But Mary Ann didn't walk home; in fact, she never got home at all.

If the police initially suspected foul play in the high school senior's disappearance, it isn't readily apparent 44 years after she was last seen. Although she failed to return home on July 15th, the first media report appeared on August 7, 1963, 3 weeks later, and did not come from law enforcement. The Chicago Tribune headline reads: "Mother Asks Help in Finding her Daughter". The short article reported only that Mary Ann failed to return home and gave a brief description of her, along with a photo.

The next (and last that I've located) media report came 6 years later, in August, 1969, when a story appeared that provided information that it was suspected that Mary Ann may have willingly left to join a traveling magazine sales crew headed to California. It states that, in 1965, the FBI spoke to a man and woman who headed a sales crew that was in Chicago when Mary Ann vanished. Both agreed that Mary Ann had been hired but there their stories differed: the woman reported that Mary Ann left with the crew for California - her husband said Mary Ann never left Chicago.

There was a letter - mailed to her parents just two days after Mary's disappearance, from Oak Park, Illinois - a little more than 4 miles from her home. In it Mary Ann says that she "is fine and going to make money to take care of them".

Every time I reread that article and get to the part where she states that she is trying to make money to take care of her parents, I lose it. Her Mother establishes a reward fund, with money earned from taking a part-time job but the reward goes unclaimed. For years, her parents run ads in the personal columns looking for someone to come forward with information, but no one does.

It will take 40 years before the deeply held secrets of the traveling magazine sales crews surface. Through the work of Parent Watch Inc., a clearinghouse for information on the door-to-door sales industry and www.magcrew.com, resources formerly out of reach for parents of missing children or stranded sales crew workers are now being made available.