For the Lost Blog

I have started a missing persons’ newsletter at Substack. Please share and subscribe; I update every Monday evening.

I coasted on the good feelings of Jaycee Dugard’s recovery for several months, so to start the year with the news that Carlina White, abducted from Harlem Hospital in 1987, has been found safe is very good news indeed. Carlina found herself on NCMEC after she noticed her “mother” had no birth certificate for her and she did not resemble her. It is also reported that she has a younger brother, who I hope the authorities will also check to make sure he is not an abducted child. Carlina’s case is of course different from Dugard’s in that almost all authorities involved thought she was still alive and abducted by someone who wanted a child, which is a common motivation in infant abductions. Since there was a possibility she was involved in a black market adoption (along with Christopher Dansby and Shane Walker, also young children abducted from New York in the same time period) I hope that this may lead to them coming home as well.

I was doing some web research for the case file of Gabriel Johnson, who I’ve posted about several times before and plan to add to the site in June. I learned that Elizabeth Johnson’s mother was Rosslyn Puckett. And her aunt (Rosslyn’s sister) was… Jane Puckett. Who went missing in 1977, believed to have been abducted, and was found safe last year.

Does it mean anything? Well, no, probably. But this is even weirder than the Shannon Dedrick/Paul Baker connection.

During some google searches for several missing persons’ cases, I came across a web poll that asked: “Why do you think kids go missing (excluding runaways)?” A reasonable question. Two of the potential answers were “Parent wants to get back at other parent” (the one I voted for) and “Parent feels they have rights” which both address the fact most missing kids are runaways and family abductions. Over forty percent of respondents, however, answered “Abductor wants sex with child” which is one of the least common reason kids vanish. And while approximately four thousand kids are abducted by a non-family member per year, I am sure the people who answered that were thinking of the stereotypical stranger abductor and not the person well known to the child as they most often are. The media’s dramatization of stranger abductions probably has a part in it. And of course no one wants to think of abductors as being people they know, and the mysterious stranger who does so is the most comforting thought. NCMEC has tried to reframe the issue of missing kids and points out stranger abductions are rare, but that gets little attention. Some do hear of a stranger abduction and then realize the true extent of the problem. Many people who heard of the case of Sean Goldman commented they had no idea how many parents abducted kids until they heard of his case. It’s a start.

DNA confirms it. And she has had two children with her kidnapper. I’m disgusted, but not really surprised.

Considering there are several other unsolved abductions in the general area, I hope these people are looked at.

I am sure by now everyone’s seen this story. Didn’t stop me from saying to myself “Oh my God.” This is Shawn Hornbeck, Elizabeth Smart, Natascha Kampusch, and Francisco Andrade Vega cubed.

I would be lying if I said that Jaycee would be okay from now on. But her family and friends don’t have to wonder anymore. Even if she had been found dead, that would be a plus. This is even better.

Francisco Javier Andrade Vega is the name of an eleven year old boy that was abducted from Baja California in 2000 by a convicted child molester. He remained missing until this year, when he was found safe in Chicago. He had no identity papers when picked up by police, but he gave them his name and he was found in the FBI’s database of cases.

Let me repeat this. He was found safe. After nine years. Missing from a non-family abduction. And there has been almost no press about this. The articles I have found that gave the above details are Mexican papers; I can find no English sources. If I didn’t know Spanish those articles would be unaccessable. And I live in Chicago. And I have heard nothing.

I rarely go on tangents about missing children publicity. I have accepted that there is a heirarchy, and that most of the cases I get involved with – family abductions, people who just vanish, older non-family abductions – are not ones that burn up the pages. And not all of it is based on race. However, in this case I can make no other conclusion but being based on race. He was abducted for nine years, and it would have been easy for his abductor to kill him once he stopped being useful. He would then have become one of the many unidentified individuals that litter the police records. But none of this happened. Him being found safe is as close to a miracle as was Shawn Hornbeck’s case.

So, I ask, why haven’t you heard of him? Why hasn’t almost anyone?