Posted on 05/20/2011 12:18:06 PM PDT by Rational Thought
Scroll down for updates…King County Superior Court has closed out our records request as of today…
There’s a lot that’s been going on behind the scenes over the past two months since my cousin Marizela Perez disappeared from the University District in Seattle on March 5, 2011. As I mentioned last week, we gathered in Seattle on Mother’s Day for a community fundraiser and benefit concert/auction. There will be another South Jersey fundraiser/bake sale/raffle on May 22. Details here.
The Seattle Times has just posted a front-page piece by reporter Christine Clarridge on Marizela’s case and the plight of other families with missing young adults. Read it here. The story provides an in-depth, compassionate, and candid look at what parents go through in cases where the police have not found evidence of foul play. Suicide has been a primary assumption on the part of the police. But the case of young Joyce Chiang — whose death 12 years ago was just reclassified last week as a homicide by Washington police who mistakenly insisted the case was a suicide — shows the dangers of locking into assumptions without thoroughly investigating all leads.
And as this Seattle Post-Intelligence article from 2003 on neglected missing persons cases underscores, police “routinely botch or ignore missing-person cases,” ignore the law, fail to use tracking systems, and close cases with little investigation.
Here’s another Seattle Times piece from 2006 on the lost and missing.
In Marizela’s case, of course, the maddening frustration is that the police have yet to obtain Internet and phone records that would help definitively rule in/rule out foul play and provide potential breakthroughs in figuring out where she might have been heading the day she vanished. I’ve been helping Marizela’s parents push for those records, and in the interest of raising awareness and informing other families who have to face the same uphill battles, am reprinting here my e-mail and phone exchanges with the Seattle Police Department, Google, and the King County Superior Court from March through the present. Subpoenaing Google in particular is key. The police found that she logged onto to her Gmail account in the morning on the day she disappeared, but they have yet to obtain Google search history logs and web history information.
Time is really of the essence here because much of the data we are seeking — e.g., the Google search history and cellphone/AIM text messages — are perishable. We are continuing to push the Seattle Police Department to issue warrants to preserve and obtain any and all perishable data from Marizela’s AT&T, Facebook, AOL, and Google accounts before it’s too late. The family already suffered one devastating blow after finding out last week that surveillance video at a Jack-In-The-Box near the intersection where she disappeared is no longer available.
The clock is ticking.
A reprint of Michelle Malkin's e-mails and phone exchanges with the Seattle Police Department, Google, and the King County Superior Court are at the link
/2011/05/20/finding-marizela-the-maddening-quest-for-a-missing-young-persons-onlinetext-info/
A family’s worst nightmare. My heart goes out to Michelle and her family, I can’t imagine the pain that they must be going through.
My stars! We live in a mad house! Could a state representative stomp on some toes for this family and force a cut to the chase effort by all parties??????????????
What ticks me off about cases like this, is ‘privacy’ concerns for the missing outweigh the safety concerns relatives have for the missing person.
Now, if Obama wanted that information...
Thank you for the update. I was thinking about this today after seeing Michelle on Fox and telling the story to my wife. Godspeed. Epidemic of lost women here in this country. In our prayers.
Prayers for her family and her safe return.
Indeed. I had lost track of this story and was hoping she had been found by now.
Anybody from the west coast care to comment in the Seattle Police Department is dysfunctional?
From Michelle's posting:
In Marizela’s case, of course, the maddening frustration is that the police have yet to obtain Internet and phone records that would help definitively rule in/rule out foul play and provide potential breakthroughs in figuring out where she might have been heading the day she vanished. I’ve been helping Marizela’s parents push for those records, and in the interest of raising awareness and informing other families who have to face the same uphill battles, am reprinting here my e-mail and phone exchanges with the Seattle Police Department, Google, and the King County Superior Court from March through the present. Subpoenaing Google in particular is key. The police found that she logged onto to her Gmail account in the morning on the day she disappeared, but they have yet to obtain Google search history logs and web history information.
As Michelle states, the clock is ticking, so what is the problem folks? Is this an example of a liberal police department and what one should expect from such a department?
Fact of life, it seems, in the 21st century...
I don’t doubt that, but others have come “back”-I regretably forget her name, but she was held for years by a perverted couple out West. While her “survival” consisted of being a concubine for a pervert, there is still hope that she may be alive at least.
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