By Leonardo Blair, Staff ReporterSOME ARE reported missing but return home after a day or two. Others, like 39-year-old Byron Miller and son Shanado, never showed up.
While the police can only speculate based on circumstantial evidence that they may still be alive, the records still have them listed as missing. For those left behind by the missing ones, the twist between agony and hope is traumatic.
Daisy Williams, 52, has been asking for information on the whereabouts of her son and her grandson since October 1 last year when Byron and Shanado went missing. She has been trying to fit the pieces of the puzzle of their disappearance together ever since. Still, even with the help of the police she can't answer the question. Are they dead or alive?
"I just want to know because I've been checking with the police and we still can't get any news," said the distraught woman. "From the time them missing, I haven't been too well. I don't know. I just don't know what to do now. If them dead, I want the body, that's all," she said.
Like the case of Claudia Kirschhoch, the American travel writer who went missing in May 2000, the situation of Byron and Shanado and several others have proved to be more than just a rebellious night out as many local missing persons reports have been found to be by the police.
Corporal Dahlia Garrick of the Constabulary Communication Network said yesterday that, as it is now, the process of investigating missing person reports in Jamaica remains a challenge. When relatives locate their missing relatives in most cases she points out, the police are not usually informed and, as a result, the records would not reflect who is missing or found unless an inquiry was made by the relatives. Some who disappear for extended periods, says Corporal Garrick, may have run off to other shores or in the worst case be dead.
In January last year, at the height of investigations into Kirschhoch's disappearance it was announced by Commissioner of Police, Francis Forbes that a Missing Persons Unit was to be set up to better investigate reports of hundreds of persons who have gone missing over extended periods since 1995.
That proposition has not yet been made a reality and the story continues. Missing, waiting to be found, dead or alive.
Police records show that between 1995 and 1999 there was a significant increase in the number of missing person reports. The figure grew from 805 in 1995 to 834 the following year; it increased to 850 in 1997 and grew to 938 in 1998, then to 1,140 in 1999. In 2000 it stood at 1,104. Last year it jumped to a high of 1,159.
