Blacks are not missing in the effort to find missing children

4th June 2012   ·   0 Comments

By Freddie Allen
Washington Correspondent

WASHINGTON (NNPA) — Derrica Wilson remembers when 24-year-old Tamika Huston vanished from their hometown of Spartanburg, S.C. in May 2004. At the time, Wilson lived in the Washington area, but Huston’s disappearance made her worry about a sister and cousin who still lived in Spartanburg.

“It was really scary,” Wilson said. “You would never in a million years think something like this would happen.”

Because it did happen, Rebkah Howard, Huston’s aunt, led the family search for Huston. Howard, a public relations executive and wife of Heisman Trop­hy winner and Super Bowl MVP Desmond Howard, knows how to deal with the media. After flooding the local media with stories about her niece’s disappearance, Howard called the cable news outlets, CNN, Fox, and MSNBC. No one was interested. She reached out to NBC, ABC and CBS. More closed doors.

“I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t even getting, you know, ‘Thank you very much, but we’re not interested in this story at this time,’” Howard said in an interview with “Dateline.”

That same summer, a year after Huston’s disappearance, Natalee Holloway, a white high school graduate from Alabama, went missing in Aruba while on vacation. Holloway updates were as ubiquitous as local weather reports. The media couldn’t get enough of the story and FBI agents, divers, cadaver dogs, Dutch soldiers and three Dutch Air Force F-16s crowded onto the island in search of Holloway.

Wilson was happy for Hol­loway’s family, but the extended effort served as a reminder of how little had been done to find Tamika Huston.

“It was very painful,” Derrica Wilson recalled. “Here you have two young ladies whose families are deserving of answers and everyone looking for their lost loved one.”

Blacks make up 12.6 percent of the U.S. population but 33 percent – nearly three times their proportion of the population – of the 678,860 persons reported missing last year, according to the FBI.

The U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention reports that 2,185 children are reported missing each day and the overwhelming majority of those children — 203,900 — are taken by family members.

Rose Walker knows that as well as anyone.

In April 2011, Walker sent two-year-old Jhada to visit her father, Jhyann (pronounced “John”) Clarke, and grandmother, Cornelia Smith, who had relocated to Washington from South Florida. Things didn’t work out between the couple, but Walker still wanted her daughter to have a good relationship with her father.

“Two weeks came, they said, ‘Can she please stay a month?’ A month came and they asked for her to stay a second month,” Walker recalled. The young mother reluctantly agreed to another extension.

By June, however, Walker sensed that something was wrong. When Clarke refused to send Jhada back home, Walker turned to the courts and obtained an emergency pick-up order for her daughter and flew from West Palm Beach, Fla. to Washington.

The young mother landed at Reagan-National Airport and hopped a cab straight to the Fifth District police department. But the police couldn’t act on the order, one of the detectives working her case told her, because the father had filed for custody of Jhada in Washington, D.C. Walker would have to wait on the outcome of that case. In this instance, the courts had handcuffed the cops, foring Walker to return to south Florida without her daughter.

When Walker got home, she Googled “child custody attorney” and called the first one that popped up. The lawyer’s retainer was $3,500 and she was billed at an hourly rate of $250 on top of that.

“I spent about $20,000 in legal fees, traveling, hotel accommodations, rental cars for this whole journey,” Walker said. She financed her quest to find her daughter by liquidating her assets and borrowing from her 401-K plan.

According to Walker, from July to October 2011, Clarke skillfully pitted the youth branch of Washington’s Metro Police Department against the D.C. and Virginia courts, dancing between jurisdictions, and ditching court hearings like a high school senior skipping the last period.

Desperate, Walker turned to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. After she completed a thick packet of forms, they posted Jhada’s missing person’s flyers in the stores and Washington suburbs.

Walker also contacted D.C. Delegate to Congress Eleanor Holmes Norton’s office but said she got nowhere. Channel 4, the local NBC TV affiliate, told her to send them and e-mail, but they never replied.

There were other dead ends as she made three trips to Washington and back, returning to an empty house in Florida and to Jhada’s even emptier room. Winter was approaching, marking nearly 150 days of anxiety. Walker worried that she might never see her daughter again.

Inconsolable sadness and suicide crept into the space that Jhada once filled with her laughter.

“I didn’t know what else to do,” Walker whispered. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

Fortunately, someone did.

Inspired by the search for Tamika Huston, Derrica Wilson founded the Black and Missing Foundation in 2008 to raise awareness about missing people of color. She draws on her 10-year career in law enforcement, and Natalie Wilson, Derrica’s sister-in-law, lends her public relations expertise to the Landover Hills, Md.-based organization.

According to BAMFI, the group gets 7,000 hits per day to their Web site, www.blackandmissing.com, and fields 50-75 calls per month through their hotline (877/972-2634), BAMFI tweets breaking news about open cases and post stories about the missing on their Facebook page.

Last September, BAMFI partnered with the syndicated “Michael Baisden Show,” launching the ‘Missing Child of the Week’ segment to highlight the stories of missing children of color. Working together, BAMFI and the Baisden radio show have reunited 10 children with their loved ones.

On Wednesday, October 12, of last year, Rose Walker appeared on the “Michael Baisden Show,” pleading for the safe return of her daughter, Jhada. Friends of Jhada’s father heard the broadcast and began pressuring him to return the child. On Friday, October 14, just before 8 p.m., after six months and eight days, Walker held her little girl again.

“It was like Christmas in October,” Walker beamed. “If it wasn’t for Derrica and Natalie, I would still be trying to get my daughter back to this day.”

Howard’s search for her niece did not have such a happy ending.

Christopher Hampton, a man Huston dated briefly before she disappeared, led authorities to where he buried her body. He had marked the grave with a cross that he made of broken branches. Hampton told the Spartanburg Herald-Journal that the two had argued and he threw a hot iron at Huston’s head, killing her. He was charged with her murder and in 2006 was sentenced to life without parole.

So why are Stacey Peterson, Elizabeth Smart, and Natalee Holloway household names and Pamela Butler, Latasha Norman, Tamika Huston just names? Sometimes it comes down to who is asking the questions.

American newspaper newsrooms jettisoned more than 2,000 minority journalists between 2008-2012. According to the latest census conducted by the American Society of News Editors, Blacks work as supervisors in just 4 percent of the 10,066 available posts.

When the National Association of Black Journalists examined diversity in television newsroom management, they found that minorities hold only 12 percent of the newsroom management positions at stations owned by ABC, Belo, CBS, Cox, Fox, Gannett, Hearst, Lin Media, Media General, Meredith, NBC, Nexstar, E.W. Scripps, Post-Newsweek and Tribune. Out of a total of 1,157 managers, 1,017 are white, 81 are Black, 42 are Hispanic, 16 are Asian and one is Native American.

That lack of diversity in the nation’s newsrooms carries over to what stories get reported.

“When you see stories about the missing, it’s usually the white, female blonde types. You’d think the only people that get kidnapped are white,” said Gregory Lee, president of the National Association of Black Journalists. “[We] need more sensitivity, more diversity in the newsrooms.”

Increasingly, African Americans aren’t waiting for the white-owned media to fulfill its responsibility —they are accepting that responsibility themselves.

In addition to working with Michael Baisden, BAMFI works with TV One on their docu-drama series “Find Our Missing.” Hosted by Emmy and Golden Globe Award-winning actress S. Epatha Merkerson the show aims to connect names and faces to the thousands of minorities that vanish without a trace every year.

Social media has become an ally in the search for missing Black children.

“The local news comes on at 4 or 5 o’clock, then again at 10 p.m. and 11p.m.,” Derrica Wilson said. “With social media, if someone goes missing at 2 p.m. you don’t have to wait until that [nightly] newscast, it goes out instantly. You never know whose going to read that profile on Facebook or Twitter.”

Reuniting — or just learning the fate of a loved one — can never come too soon.

This article was originally published in the June 4, 2012 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper