Posted on 03/28/2007 10:20:05 AM PDT by Graybeard58
When Janice Smolinski's 31-year-old son Billy disappeared in 2004, there were no Amber Alerts, no urgent police investigations.
Police made the family wait three days to report the Waterbury man's disappearance because a neighbor believed he left town voluntarily. The family organized its own search parties and pressured police to fingerprint Billy's truck, his mother says.
Two and a half years later, Billy Smolinski is nowhere to be found and his mother has joined a national push for more consistent laws for handling missing-adult cases.
The group's Campaign for the Missing is lobbying this year in Connecticut, New Jersey, Florida, Oregon, New York, Missouri, Ohio and Indiana.
"Our system isn't working," says Janice Smolinski. "Unfortunately, when adults go missing, they don't really take it seriously."
Just under half of the more than 109,000 active records in the National Crime Information Center's missing person file as of 2005 involved adults.
The National Center for Missing Adults, a government-supported organization that handled more than 23,000 reports and helped nearly 25,000 family members in 2005, had its federal funding cut last year to $148,000.
In October, the organization warned it may close its doors if it did not get more funding; it did not return repeated calls recently, and it was not clear whether it was still in operation.
The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, in comparison, typically receives more than $35 million a year from the federal government.
Police say they do not have the resources to focus attention on every case, particularly because there is nothing in the law to prevent an adult from walking away from his friends and family.
"We cannot do for everybody that they would like us to do," said West Hartford Police Chief James Strillacci, legislative chairman for the Connecticut Police Chiefs Association. "We can only do what the law and our budgets allow."
Contrary to TV crime shows, he said, the FBI rarely assists in missing adult cases.
Family members said they believe local police need better training and more resources to track down missing adults. The laws proposed by Campaign for the Missing would require police to accept most missing-persons reports and to collect certain information, such as blood type and eye color.
The families also want to require police to enter all collected information, including DNA, into federal databases and to provide updates to family members. They also want to ban the cremation of unidentified remains.
Kelly Jolkowski helped create the Campaign for the Missing after her 19-year-old son Jason vanished from the family's Omaha, Neb., driveway in 2001.
"The only thing you can do is get the story out there," she says.
"One of these days you're going to hit the right person."
Jolkowski says she has heard horror stories from families whose local police departments did not know of the federal DNA database. She has also learned of unidentified bodies cremated or buried in unmarked graves without any DNA taken.
In Indianapolis, family members say it took six weeks for a formal police investigation into the disappearance of Molly Dattilo, who disappeared in 2004.
"They could have tracked down more people in the very beginning with a fresh memory," says Dattilo's cousin, Keri Dattilo. "I think they need to start taking these cases seriously in the beginning. They need to listen to the families."
Dattilo has not been found.
I have (had) a cousin who disappeared thirty years ago. We couldn't get the authorities to care then either. His children are now adults with no idea of who their father was or what happened to him.
(The THINGS one finds on the 'net!)
Molly Datillo is from our little town down here in S. Indiana, but she went missing back in Indianapolis, where I believe she was visiting her brother at the time. Her family are members of our Catholic parish and own a produce business here. They are extremely respected and well-known in these parts. I have only lived here a year, but from the people I have talked to, Molly was very responsible and IIRC, getting ready to start her sophomore year in college. It is unlikely that she just took off (and I believe there has been evidence that she was abducted). Her family has gone to great expense and energy to keep the search for her alive. Just because a person is an adult doesn't mean they go missing willingly (although there are plenty of cases where they do).
Msg "Quix". He will tell you that they were all abducted by space aliens.
I am pretty much lost myself, but only my bankers and creditors have no idea how to find me :)
LOL, I didn't think of that!
My mother loves all those shows that dramatize real-life crimes. It was a mild annoyance to me to watch a fictionalized re-enactment of a real-life crime that in the real world involved non-white criminals, but in the TV version, had the criminals changed to white people.
I figured it was a PC thing to sanitize life as it actually is.
I was rather surprised to find out that the reason they did this was because the viewership for these shows increases when the race of the criminals in these shows is white, even tho in the real world the actual crimes were committed by non-whites.
It turns out that TV viewers "identify" more with the characters when they are of the same race as themselves, and, as the TV audience is largely white, these shows will gain higher ratings when more white criminals are shown.
I had one of those too, when I was a kid in the 70s.
The hot dogs never seemed to taste as good as when they were boiled the old-fashioned way. It was like I was eating mutant hot dogs, unnaturally cooked by electrocution.
I tried it a few times, then the contraption went into storage, and disappeared eventually.
Groan!
Yup
LOL
I just could *not* help myself.......
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