Ohio’s missing people: They vanished. Families say police failed them

The Columbus Dispatch
Danae King and Max Filby
November 25, 2024

Amina Alhaj-Omar clutched three kitchen knives in front of her as she circled the inside of a gas station on the city’s Far South Side.

Amina’s family had not heard from her for at least three days and her sister — instead of police — discovered footage showing one of the last places the 25-year-old Ohio State University graduate student was spotted.

At about 4 a.m. on June 10, 2023, security cameras captured Amina walking around a BP station on South High Street for more than two hours, staring at rows of drinks, lying down on the floor, and asking what year it was to an unsuspecting clerk, who didn’t call police.

“Oh my god, there she is,” her sister, Miriam Alhaj-Omar, said when she saw the footage on June 12, 2023. “I was terrified. She looked extremely scared and helpless and just not in reality.”

Miriam felt certain the discovery would persuade Columbus police to help find her sister.

When she first reported Amina missing at 4 p.m. on June 10, 2023, Miriam said police did not believe that her sister struggled with mental illness. They told her that Amina was an adult and didn’t have to share her whereabouts, Miriam said.

But Miriam knew better.

Amina, who her sisters described as funny and a “soft, kind soul,” was hospitalized in 2018 for schizophrenia. Due to Amina’s mental illness, Miriam worried about her sister’s safety and whether she could be a victim of foul play.

At that point, Miriam said she became the detective in her own sister’s disappearance — a role that countless loved ones of missing persons have been forced to take on themselves.

Like Amina, tens of thousands of Ohioans vanish every year as part of what the Department of Justice in 2007 labeled the nation’s “silent mass disaster.” Seventeen years later, that disaster has escalated in Ohio as the number of missing persons increased by nearly 18% over the past three years.

An eight-month Dispatch investigation found that despite claiming high solve rates, Ohio law enforcement agencies have for years exacerbated the missing persons crisis and have failed hundreds of Ohioans who have vanished.

On any given day, roughly 1,000 Ohioans are listed as missing by the Ohio Attorney General’s Office. And at least 689 Ohioans — including 366 children — remained missing more than a year after they disappeared, according to data from the Ohio Attorney General’s Office through October.

The Dispatch found police have stymied their own investigations by failing to inform loved ones and the public of new developments, by flouting department policies, best practices, and possibly federal law, and by disregarding pleas from families like Amina’s who insist a vanished loved one may be in danger.

“The initial thought is: ‘Oh, I’m going to call the police.’ Then you realize they’re not going to do anything,” said Zenab Alhaj-Omar, one of Amina’s sisters who lived with her but was abroad when she vanished.

Worried about Amina, Zenab asked Miriam to check on their sister after she stopped replying to her near-daily texts and calls June 9, 2023.

A day later, Miriam found Amina’s purse on the sidewalk outside her locked condo and called police, but she said they refused to enter Amina’s home. Instead, she hired a locksmith.

Inside, Miriam found Amina’s condo in disarray. All of the electronics were unplugged, and Amina had made piles of her belongings throughout her home.

Desperate to get police attention, Miriam said she called them again and again and again.

Her calls yielded some cooperation when she said a detective sent her locations where Amina’s car had been seen.

Miriam found Amina’s car, with an open gas cap and a missing tire, on I-270 east near I-71 south on Columbus’ South Side on June 11, 2023. Miriam took the next exit, onto U.S. 23 south, to the BP gas station where the clerk told her he had seen Amina. The next day, a gas station manager showed Miriam and later an officer the footage of her sister.

After seeing the tape, Miriam said Columbus police began taking Amina’s disappearance more seriously. Columbus police labeled Amina “high-risk” — a designation that allows the division’s Missing Persons Unit to give a case its undivided attention and resources.

But by that point, it was likely too late.

Amina’s body was found in a quarry near the BP station on July 12, 2023. The Franklin County Coroner’s office ruled her death an accidental drowning.

While her sisters got the closure many families of missing persons don’t, they wonder if Amina would still be alive had police taken her mental illness more seriously from the start.

More than a year later, Amina’s absence still lingers like an inescapable weight on her sisters.

“You almost have to stop yourself or you’re just going to spiral,” Zenab said of memories with Amina. “During happy moments, it’s … the hardest.”

A ‘free-for-all’ and a ‘failure’

The missing persons disaster described by the DOJ may not resemble the plumes of smoke that billowed from the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, or the flood waters that filled New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

But its human toll is akin to some of the world’s worst catastrophes as an estimated 600,000 people a year go missing nationwide — including 22,374 Ohioans last year alone.

Families with unsolved cases said they’ve been left for weeks, months and sometimes years in agonizing limbo — not knowing whether their missing loved ones are alive or dead, or what police are doing to find them. Their stories of vanished husbands, sisters, daughters, fathers, and close friends stretch across decades and much of Ohio.

An out-of-state mother said she was prohibited from filing a police report over the phone, and it was later discovered that her missing adult daughter had been kidnapped and trafficked for sex in Columbus.

A southwest Ohio woman’s husband disappeared during her birthday celebration at Easton Town Center, and she said police suggested he walked away from his marriage and life, despite there being no trace of him five years later.

An Akron girl who was raped and reported missing when she ran away from home three times in six months was found dead in an alley even though police and children services knew for months that she was in danger.

It took eight years for the son of a missing Black man in Cincinnati to get a meeting with a detective, and he said he believes police pushed aside his father’s case because of his race.

A missing transgender woman’s friend said she was told to wait and see if she returned home, only to later discover that her blood and spent cartridge casings from a handgun were found in her friend’s car.

Together, their stories represent a fraction of the fear, grief and pain loved ones suffer when law enforcement drops the ball in missing persons cases and leaves families in the lurch, said Michelle Jeanis, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

“Police don’t know what to do when they get a missing persons case,” Jeanis said. “(It’s) a free-for-all.”

Interviews with dozens of families, advocates, and law enforcement officers along with a review of thousands of records including more than 1,200 missing persons cases spanning 96 years found police rarely use every tool at their disposal to bring missing Ohioans home.

At the end of 2023, for example, police had not submitted the photos of at least 440 missing Ohioans and the race of 52 others to the FBI’s National Crime Information Center (NCIC) — making it harder for the public or law enforcement in other jurisdictions to find and identify them.

Of the 366 Ohio children the state listed as missing a year or more, law enforcement failed to enter 327, or 89% of those missing kids, into the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) — a federal clearinghouse that has helped solve more than 46,000 disappearances since its creation in 2007. Federal law adopted in 2022 requires law enforcement officers who enter missing children into NCIC to also submit them to NamUs.

The Dispatch found the Ohioans who go missing are disproportionately Black, making up 12.5% of the state’s population but 43.2% of those who vanished in Ohio through the end of 2023.

The Dispatch’s findings prove law enforcement officers let biases get in the way of their jobs and often fail to do the bare minimum to investigate missing persons cases, said M. Cris Armenta, a California-based attorney and leader of The Find Project, a nonprofit dedicated to finding missing persons.

“It is a failure from the top down,” Armenta said. “It’s both an institutional failure and a human failure. … We can, as a society, do a lot better.”

As failures have mounted, the number of missing Ohioans increased in 2022 and 2023 after years of declines.

At least 22,374 Ohioans were reported missing in 2023, up 17.6% from the 19,014 reported in 2021, according to an annual report from Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost’s office. The last time more Ohioans vanished was in 2019 when 24,292 were reported missing. Ohio hit a 10-year high of 25,619 missing persons in 2018, statewide data shows.

Ohio law enforcement is “understaffed in virtually every police department in the state,” Yost said.

But Yost said he’s made missing persons cases a priority during his five and a half years as attorney general. His office is working on an improved statewide database of missing Ohioans, though it’s unclear when it will debut.

While Yost acknowledged his elected position as Ohio’s chief law enforcement official gives him influence few other Ohioans have, he said a lack of resources and problems with how police investigate missing persons were not his fault.

“These are localized problems that belong to mayors and city councils and police chiefs,” Yost said.

Nationally, about 70% of missing persons cases are solved within 72 hours, according to the FBI. The Columbus Division of Police said it consistently has a 96% recovery rate for disappearances that can fluctuate up or down from year to year and reached 99% in 2023.

But not every case counted in that measure of success results in a happy ending, The Dispatch found. Missing persons who are found dead, such as Amina, are counted in the Columbus police recovery rate, a spokeswoman said.

Columbus police declined to say how many cases go unsolved a year “due to the fluid nature” of investigations, the police spokeswoman said. With thousands of missing persons reports filed annually in Columbus though, it’s possible anywhere from dozens to hundreds of cases remain unsolved each year.

Columbus police encouraged families of missing persons who feel their cases are being mishandled to share their concerns with police so they can be addressed, according to a prepared statement. At the same time, police declined to directly answer The Dispatch’s questions about specific cases and suggested families are responsible for some of the frustrations they shared.

Asked about families who learned of developments in a loved one’s case from the news, police blamed relatives for not sharing updates with each other. When pressed about accusations of Columbus police dragging their feet, police said much investigative work “goes on behind the scenes” and might not be apparent to families.

“We understand and empathize with the anguish of loved ones desperate for updates and answers,” police said. “We do our sincere best to keep families informed of any developments, which requires a balancing act of being transparent while also not compromising the investigation.”

Missing persons reports pile up

In the Columbus police Missing Persons Unit, one sergeant oversees eight detectives who are tasked with investigating what is one of the most common incidents reported to the division.

In the past decade, between 3,207 and 6,934 reports of missing persons — including repeat runaways — were filed every year with Columbus police, data shows. In 2023, Columbus police received 3,917 reports.

The caseload means each of the eight detectives is responsible for anywhere from 400 to 867 missing persons reports per year, although police said many are resolved in a matter of hours or days.

Most people would find it “hard to even fathom,” that Columbus police receive that many reports a year, said Sgt. Gerald Ehrsam, who oversees the missing persons unit.

But detectives are not overwhelmed, said Lt. Jason Garner, who leads the family crimes section of Columbus police, which includes missing persons. Garner, who sometimes works seven days a week to cover a staffing gap, has asked to hire more detectives in missing persons but said the request has been put on hold.

While Columbus police said they aren’t overrun, a woman pushing for help to find her missing husband said she was told: “‘Do you know how many missing persons there are in Columbus?’”

Brittany Davis, then-23, of Wilmington, Ohio said that she refused to accept that detective’s response after she filed a report about Tyler Davis, her 29-year-old husband who vanished from Easton Town Center in February 2019.

“Do you know how many husbands I have? Do you know how many fathers my son has?’” Davis replied.

When Davis initially tried to report her husband missing, she said an officer told her: “’He’s a grown man. He can leave you if he wants to leave you.’”

When asked about Davis’ allegations, Garner said he wasn’t aware of a problem like that happening.

But the sheer volume of missing persons reports Columbus police get forces them to make tough calls about which case gets attention first, Garner and Ehrsam said.

“It’s just a simple reality, kind of like an ER, where not everybody can come in right away,” Ehrsam said.

One of those decisions is whether to designate a disappearance as “high-risk,” a label that elevates a case and immediately garners it more attention and resources until a recovery is made or all possible leads have been exhausted, according to police.

Garner and Ehrsam said they make that decision after reviewing each report and before they assign it to a detective. But Garner said the process can be slowed when patrol officers fail to get enough information from families to make a judgment on a case.

Age is among the chief considerations for prioritizing cases, according to the division’s general orders on missing persons.

Until recently, any missing child age 12 and under was considered high-risk by Columbus police. That age was lowered to 10 in March 2023 to weed out repeat runaways, and in accordance with best practices, Garner said.

Yet the cutoff age differs across Ohio. In Akron and Toledo, it’s 13 and under; in Cleveland and Dayton, it’s 14. Cincinnati does not appear to set an age.

If an older child or adult is reported missing, Columbus police don’t “look at them any less seriously,” Garner said. However, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette’s Jeanis questioned the wisdom of the age policy, calling it “absurd.”

“We as a nation decided what childhood was … that’s until 18,” she said. “To decide childhood is more or less dangerous between 10 or 11 … is incredibly concerning.”

Along with age, Columbus police said they consider a variety of other factors, including evidence of foul play, a person’s mental health at the time of a disappearance, and if someone is a senior citizen and thought to be at risk of harm.

While police frequently work multiple cases at a time, less urgent cases can pile up once a high-risk person is identified, Garner and Ehrsam said.

“We may work 15-, 16-, 20-hour days,” Ehrsam said. “Depending on what’s going on, we’re not going home.”

‘She had no choice’ but to run away

Rhonda Elkins-Chapman could see when the light in her granddaughter’s eyes vanished.

Melanie Elkins, 13, had been raped at least three times by her father’s friend in her Akron home in 2022, according to court records. She also accused her father of pinning her down and punching her in December 2022, Akron police reports show, though he was not charged.

The trauma served as a dividing line in Melanie’s life.

The once happy, bright girl, whom a teacher described as someone who had “everything going for her,” began keeping knives under her pillow at night for protection, her grandmother said. When that was no longer enough, she ran away three times over a period of a few months in 2023.

Each time Melanie ran away from home, the odds of her being found safe were on her side.

Of the 17,405 children who went missing in 2023, the majority were runaways and 98% were safely recovered, according to the Ohio Attorney General’s Office.

But Melanie wouldn’t be so lucky.

Her body was found in an alley on June 12, 2023, after she ran away for the third time. The Summit County Medical Examiner ruled Melanie’s cause of death a combination of methamphetamine and fentanyl.

Her grandmother blames law enforcement and children services, who she said left Melanie with no option but to try to flee her own home.

“She felt she had no choice because there was no way out,” Elkins-Chapman said. “The system failed her so bad.”

Like Melanie, 54% of Ohio children who went missing in 2023 were labeled “runaways.” Nationwide, runaways accounted for 74% of missing children reported to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in 2023.

While the runaway label is commonly used, it’s a term experts said allows police to deprioritize missing children and treat them as “incorrigible.”

“We hear ‘runaway’ and we think … bad kids, and so then we ignore it,” Jeanis said. “When, in fact, the vast majority of our runaway kiddos are being abused and neglected … they’re running from that.”

Melanie’s death capped months of both sexual and alleged physical abuse, according to police and court records.

On Thanksgiving Day 2022, Melanie first told her grandmother that her dad’s friend had raped her. Elkins-Chapman filed a motion in court for emergency custody, writing: “My granddaughter is living in fear.”

The grandmother’s motion was denied, as records show the court determined there was no immediate danger to Melanie. Still, Melanie’s grandmother kept trying.

Melanie ran away for the first time around six weeks later, on Jan. 8, 2023.

“I’m telling her to hang in there, and it got to the point where now she’s … a runaway,” Elkins-Chapman said.

Anthony Mignano was charged in March 2023 with rape of a minor and was sentenced Feb. 6 to life in prison, according to Summit County Court records.

Still, Melanie ran away again in April 2023 and one final time in June 2023.

Although patrol officers began looking for Melanie after her father reported her missing one last time at 1:56 a.m. on June 11, 2023, a detective didn’t begin investigating her disappearance until more than a day later, said Sgt. John Ross of the Akron Police Department. Her body was found at about 1 p.m. on June 12, 2023.

“There really isn’t a sense of urgency in finding (runaways),” said Derrica Wilson, cofounder of the Maryland-based nonprofit Black and Missing Foundation, Inc. “Public awareness is key … the community can’t help if they’re not aware.”

Since Akron police labeled Melanie a runaway, she was automatically excluded from being eligible for a statewide Amber Alert — something only issued for missing kids at serious risk of death or injury who were abducted. Although Melanie’s disappearance ended in her death, Akron police said she didn’t qualify for an endangered missing child alert, a notification with a lower threshold that doesn’t exclude runaways.

When another teen vanished around June 27, 2023, Akron police shared her information and photos on social media within hours. Meanwhile, police didn’t use social media to alert the public about Melanie any of the three times she ran away, The Dispatch found.

“I don’t think there’s anything more we could have done,” said Akron police spokesman Capt. Michael Miller. “(But still) no one was satisfied with that outcome.”

Melanie’s father did not return calls for comment. Summit County Children Services declined to comment on the case, citing Ohio law that requires records of child welfare agencies be kept confidential.

Keith Earley, of Akron, was arrested in connection with her death and charged with abuse of a corpse and failure to report a crime, court records show. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced in January to nine months in jail.

Melanie’s death is a tragedy, Elkins-Chapman said, and never would have happened if those with authority had done something to get her granddaughter out of danger — which would have eliminated the very reason she ran away.

“Everybody knew,” Elkins-Chapman said. “The unanswered question is, ‘Did anybody help her this whole time?’”

Searching on Sullivant for a missing daughter

Sandra Sills’ daughter might not be alive today if it weren’t for her.

When Sills’ then-29-year-old daughter didn’t call her as planned on Feb. 29, she felt a pit in her stomach. After three more days passed, Sills knew her daughter was missing and in danger.

Her daughter, who requested anonymity for her safety, had been fighting to become sober and recently escaped the clutches of a man who was trafficking her for sex on Columbus’ West Side.

Sills called Columbus police to file a missing persons report, but they sent her to the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office instead. She was passed back and forth between the law enforcement agencies before both declined to take a report over the phone, she said.

“Agencies play nose goes. You put your finger on your nose and (say): ‘not it,'” Jeanis said. “I’ve seen law enforcement agencies go weeks back and forth.”

So Sills made the nine-hour drive from Anderson, South Carolina, to Columbus a week after her daughter went missing to file a report in person.

Whether someone is able to file a missing persons report over the phone depends on the officer or dispatcher he or she spoke to, Garner said.

Although Garner said he personally would take a report by phone, he said it can be difficult to verify someone’s identity over the phone despite various ways people identify themselves virtually for other reasons.

“It could be an aunt, uncle, cousin, a friend of the family, anybody who knows your basic information, just trying to file a report to stir the pot,” Garner said.

When Columbus police finally took Sills’ report, she said they told her that her daughter likely went back to her old life.

Their logic didn’t make sense though, Sills said.

Her daughter wouldn’t have appeared for a court hearing the day she disappeared if she planned on running away, Sills said.

In the additional week Sills said it took Columbus police to assign a detective to the case, she walked Sullivant Avenue in the chilly March weather, hanging flyers and talking to passersby for leads.

Sills didn’t know it then, but as she searched the Hilltop, she was just steps from the dilapidated apartment building where her daughter was being held against her will.

“It was not the agencies I contacted, not the police … it was the people in the streets that were helping me,” Sills said.

Sills also convinced her daughter’s probation officer to file an arrest warrant for her.

After weeks of being tied, beaten and drugged with fentanyl, her daughter’s trafficker forced her back onto the streets March 15. Sills’ daughter said she heard that one of the “johns” looking to pay for sex was an undercover officer.

She headed straight for his car, hoping to get arrested and escape her captor. The officer saw the active warrant Sills had pushed for, and her daughter was arrested for soliciting, court records show.

“I’m not sure that I would’ve ever seen her again alive had I not gone up there,” Sills said. “I’m sure to them it’s just another addict or junkie who’s gone back to the streets.”

Sills’ daughter said she wasn’t shocked police did not want to take her mother’s report.

She said police don’t care about people recovering from addiction or who have been involved in sex work. Police often treat it as a choice, she said, rather than something that circumstances or traffickers might force someone into.

Asked about the disappearance of Sills’ daughter, Columbus police denied that a person’s identity, health or life circumstances would ever be a factor in how a case is prioritized.

Sills’ daughter has since left Columbus. She’s now in a rehabilitation program and ready to put the days when she was missing behind her.

“If (police) would take us seriously, they would save a lot of lives,” she said.

Father was ‘just another Black man’ to police, his kids said

Reality hadn’t yet set in for Austin Deller as he and dozens of others searched the grassy grounds of Mt. Echo Park on an early fall day in 2014 for his missing father.

Timothy Stanton, then 40, vanished days earlier in September, and the 84-acre park with a view of the Cincinnati skyline was one of his favorite spots to visit. Deller, 16, didn’t quite grasp that he was in a search party as he walked the sprawling park, looking for any signs of Stanton — a piece of clothing, his wallet or even a body.

“I was, of course, in denial at first… I remember telling my teachers: ‘Hey, I’m going to miss school tomorrow because we’re going on another search for my dad,'” Deller said.

As weeks turned into months, Deller said he still thought his outgoing and caring father would reappear.

The odds, however, were stacked against Stanton from the moment he went missing, a Dispatch analysis found.

While Black people make up a mere 12.5% of Ohio’s population, a far higher percentage were missing throughout the state as of the end of 2023.

In Ohio, 43% of all missing persons are Black, The Dispatch found. That number is even higher among children, as Black kids account for 54% of missing minors in Ohio.

Police often treat families of missing Black people differently from white families, said Wilson, whose Black and Missing Foundation helps to find people of color.

Law enforcement officials lead search efforts and hold news conferences when a white person goes missing, Wilson said. Much of that never comes to pass when a person of color vanishes, she said.

“Law enforcement tends to be dismissive of people of color,” Wilson said.

Wilson’s foundation was born from the 2004 disappearance of Tamika Huston, a Black woman whose case received little attention and sat stagnant for more than a year.

Two years earlier, Laci Peterson’s Christmas Eve disappearance from Modesto, California, garnered nationwide attention and widespread police scrutiny. A year after Huston went missing, Natalee Holloway vanished during a 2005 trip to Aruba and grabbed headlines.

Likewise, when Stanton went missing in Cincinnati, his daughter Alyssa Deller said a white man disappeared around the same time.

She remembers law enforcement doing everything they could to bring the missing white man home, while they were not even involved in her father’s search party.

Stanton suffered from bipolar disorder but was on medication and kept the mental illness in check, Alyssa Deller said. Yet she and her brother said police treated their dad as the “crazy Black man,” adding the stigma of mental health to racism.

Cincinnati police did not respond to requests for comment on Stanton’s case.

While it’s unclear what happened to Stanton, his family now fears he was a victim of foul play, and that police inaction is to blame for his unknown whereabouts.

It means Stanton has missed out on walking his daughter down the aisle at her wedding and meeting some of his grandkids.

“I feel like his case just got passed off and passed around,” Alyssa Deller said. “They looked at him as just another Black man. He wasn’t important.”

More training on a speed gun?

Although insufficient resources have left law enforcement sometimes drowning in missing persons reports, experts told The Dispatch that training is also lacking.

Better training would help police identify warning signs, Armenta said. Missing persons cases are different from most other crimes police investigate and so they need to be examined differently, Armenta said.

“Law enforcement is, by nature, reactive,” Armenta said. “They’re reactive to a homicide, reactive to an assault, reactive to a burglary. But with a missing person, they often don’t have a lot to go on.”

Missing persons training makes up roughly 2% of basic training for police officers, according to the Ohio Peace Officer Training Commission.

Black and Missing’s Wilson said she saw firsthand that there needs to be more training.

Wilson spent 20 years in law enforcement in Falls Church, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C. As an officer, she received just one to two hours of training on missing persons.

“There needs to be enhanced training,” she said. “Missing persons is very complex.”

In Ohio, 14 hours of the 740-hour basic training was dedicated to missing persons and human trafficking as of June 30, according to a curriculum listing. Officers received 40 hours — nearly three times more training — on how to operate a radar gun to catch speeding motorists, a requirement which is set to be removed.

But more comprehensive missing persons training shouldn’t be optional, said Chanel Dickerson, a retired assistant chief from the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington. As commander of the department’s missing persons unit, Dickerson found many officers didn’t even know what to ask families, such as whether their loved one was on medication or possibly in danger.

“I wish more police departments would take this seriously,” Dickerson said.

While basic police officer training includes little on missing persons, the Ohio Attorney General’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation (BCI) offers additional educational opportunities to law enforcement around the state, said Dana Forney, criminal intelligence director at BCI.

There may be years between an officer’s initial training and when they become a detective, Yost said. It might make sense then, he said, to require more training for missing persons units later on in larger police departments like Columbus.

“They’re not going to remember anything they learned about missing persons … when they finally start working those cases,” Yost said.

‘We can’t just do things the way we’ve always done them’

NamUs, the publicly accessible federal database that has helped to solve tens of thousands of missing persons cases over 17 years, is missing hundreds of Ohioans.

As of Oct. 31, at least 50% of the 689 Ohioans missing for a year or more were absent from NamUs, a Dispatch analysis found. It’s a gap that puts Ohio behind at least 16 other states that require law enforcement reporting to NamUs and shows police are not using every tool available to find missing Ohioans.

While Yost doesn’t want to add more to law enforcement’s workload or create an unfunded mandate, he said a law change may be needed to require police to submit all long-term cases to NamUs.

“We’ve got to think about doing things differently,” Yost said. “We can’t just do things the way we’ve always done them.”

In Ohio, police are required to submit missing persons reports to the National Crime Information Center (NCIC), a system only accessible to law enforcement. Yost’s office pulls NCIC data to create its public-facing database of missing Ohioans.

But a Dispatch review of the state’s database shows that Ohio law enforcement didn’t submit everything they could to NCIC.

Details, such as a person’s race or the circumstances surrounding their disappearance, are sometimes missing from NCIC entries, The Dispatch found.

Photos, which can be crucial to identifying missing people, often aren’t submitted to NCIC, said Jennifer Lester, a criminal intelligence analyst at Ohio BCI. In fact, it’s people like Lester who pull photos of the missing from the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles to use in the Ohio Attorney General’s database.

At the federal level, there has been some work to standardize law enforcement requirements around missing persons.

Billy’s Law, signed by President Joe Biden in 2022, requires the Department of Justice to reconcile discrepancies in missing persons reports filed with NCIC and NamUs. It also requires reports of missing children that are entered into NCIC to be submitted to NamUs.

Two years after the law passed, Jeanis said those changes are clearly still a work in progress.

“Missing persons has always kind of been ignored,” Jeanis said. “I really thought when our president signed that in, that that was going to bring funding and a push for protocol that I have not seen.”

‘Wait for a loved one to be murdered’

Bre Belcher knew something was wrong when she hadn’t heard from her best friend, Sacoya Cooper, for almost two days.

Cooper, who Belcher described as outgoing, followed her from the Toledo area to Columbus a few years earlier. The two had been inseparable since the age of 15, and a day rarely went by when they didn’t exchange text messages, phone calls or a visit.

Belcher said she knew that Cooper, a 33-year-old Black transgender woman, didn’t just vanish Aug. 31, 2021. But after a report was filed, Belcher said she turned to Columbus police for help, and they told her to wait and see if Cooper returned since she was an adult.

“We’re supposed to sit back and just wait for a loved one to be murdered?” Belcher asked. “Why are we giving it 48 hours if the first 48 hours is the most crucial time to find a missing person?”

Cooper’s brother, James Carswell, said he didn’t have much luck with police either.

In the days after Cooper vanished, Carswell said his phone calls to police went unanswered. Once a detective was assigned to Cooper’s case, Carswell said police told him the detective was on vacation.

At the same time, Gabrielle Petito’s disappearance during a road trip with her fiancé in Wyoming drew national, daily attention. More than five months passed before Columbus police hosted a news conference on Cooper’s case.

Whether a case like Cooper’s gets the scrutiny it deserves shouldn’t be left to the whims of a detective who gets assigned it, said The Find Project’s Armenta. As an attorney and advocate, Armenta has gone so far as to get officers removed from cases if they’re not being investigated.

“It’s the move of last resort because the blue line makes things very unfriendly for you,” she said. “I make sure and take the hit for it and tell them: ‘I’m the problem. The family, they’re nice people. I’m the bitch you don’t want to deal with.’”

Columbus police found Cooper’s car in a Columbus parking lot in October 2021, but her family said police didn’t tell them about it until February 2022. Inside, police discovered evidence of foul play, they told Carswell, but they didn’t say what exactly they found.

More than three years after Cooper’s disappearance, an affidavit for a warrant reviewed by The Dispatch revealed police discovered blood and spent shell casings in Cooper’s vehicle. The warrant also named a person of interest who neither Carswell nor Belcher said they knew of.

“I feel like we’ve been told so many lies,” said Carswell, who may now take Armenta’s advice and hire an attorney.

Still unsolved, Cooper’s disappearance is defined as a “cold case” by Columbus’ Missing Persons Unit because it’s remained open for more than a year. Unless there’s a break in Cooper’s case, it will be reviewed annually like other cold cases are each year, according to police.

But blood and shell casings are harder to ignore than Cooper’s absence, and Carswell said they’re a sign his sister won’t let police shelve her case forever.

“It’s Sacoya talking. She’s doing this,” he said. “She’s ready to be found.”

Photo credit: The Columbus Dispatch