Families work to find their missing relatives
Annual event helps people try to locate absent loved ones
It was midmorning on a warm and cloudy Saturday when Johnathan Lee Hamilton left his family home in Houston in his father’s gray GMC Envoy to grab a bottle of Coke and a cup of Starbucks coffee for his sister Cheyenne.
The handsome 6-foot-2-inch young man took the family’s German shepherd, Shadow, with him for the ride, which was unusual. Perhaps he wanted to have a last goodbye with the dog.
He went back home just to leave the pet and deliver the beverages, like a final offering to his family, and gunned his father’s SUV as far as he could away from the city.
It was May 2, 2015, three weeks before Johnathan’s 27th birthday, and the last time his family saw him.
The family reported Johnathan, who had just finished a course in welding, as a missing person to the Houston Police Department. He was spotted two days later 134 miles away at a garage parking in Bastrop, near Austin.
Angie Hamilton, his mother, said she and her husband begged the local police to detain Johnathan until the family could pick him up for the sake of his safety, as her son was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes and
bipolar disorder. But she said they were told that, since the young man “hasn’t done anything wrong, they couldn’t take him.” By the time they arrived, he was gone.
The family represents thousands of others nationwide who face a maze of police and other agencies to find what happened to their loved ones.“People have no idea how serious this is,” said Darrin Buse, HPD detective.
To help families like the Hamilton’s, the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences on Sunday kicked off its fourth annual Missing in Harris County Day. Also participating were families of about a dozen missing people, officers from the Harris County Sheriff’s Office and HPD and others.
Law enforcement agencies in the Houston area annually receive more than 7,000 missing person reports, of which a majority are runaways, while others may have died, suffer from mental disabilities, are addicted to drugs or don’t want to be found, said Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez. Last year, his office dealt with roughly 3,000 missing person reports.
HPD received a higher number of missing person reports last year, 9,500, and its dedicated unit of 11 officers has close to a 90 percent success rate resolving cases, Buse said.
On Sunday, services were offered for free, including guidance to search and introduce information about missing people in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. NamUs, as it is called, has two searchable databases. One is for missing persons, which is populated by reports from law enforcement, medical examiners and families with verifiable cases. There are currently more than 14,000 open cases in the system, of which 1,097 are from Texas.
Reported missing person cases are automatically crosssearched against the unidentified deceased persons’ database in NamUs, containing reports from coroners and law enforcement agencies. Almost 12,000 active but unidentified cases are open in the system, 1,881 of them from Texas.
NamUs historically has been able to match about 20 percent of the unidentified remains with missing persons cases. But the critical data introduced in the system that facilitates the pairing is the DNA extracted from both the bodies and families looking for missing loved ones.
Taking saliva swabs to extract families’ DNA is one of the most valuable services offered to attendees for free, said Sharon Derrick, who started the annual event
Deana Hebert provided her saliva sample. She had already done so long ago as her daughter Bianca Lozano was kidnapped by her father in 1995, when the girl was only 18 months old, and presumably taken to Mexico.
Derrick, who is in charge of identification at the forensic institute, recommended retaking the mother’s DNA.
One of the main problems for matching missing persons with unidentified bodies is a lack of information about the existence of NamUs, not only by families struggling to find their loved ones but also by law enforcement agencies, mainly in small towns and rural areas with limited resources, said Melissa Rangel, a case manager at the Texas Center for the Missing in Houston.
Many cities and counties around the country bury or cremate unidentified remains without collecting DNA samples, according to The National Institute of Justice, an agency of the Department of Justice.
Rangel said that there isn’t any federal law requiring the report of unidentified remains or adult missing people to NamUs or to the FBI’s National Crime Information Center, the other primary system collecting this information.
A 2016 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office to the Congress found that “a mass disaster over time” has occurred due to the fact that the two national databases remain separate.
There are as many as 100,000 active missing persons cases in the U.S. on any given day, while “more than 40,000 sets of human remains that cannot be identified are held in the evidence rooms of medical examiners throughout the country” or are buried or cremated under local public jurisdictions.
“Where is my son? What happened to my son?” said Angie Hamilton said last week with a voice tamed by a stream of tears. She said she has called law enforcement agencies and people all around the country looking for Johnathan. No answers. She has followed tips to places from people believing they have seen her son. It’s never him.
Sometimes Angie Hamilton wonders if Johnathan is one of the thousands of souls who have fallen through the cracks of a system that fails to have a uniform way to deal with the missing people and unidentified human remains.
“I have a battle going on within myself, between what my mind knows and what my hearts feels, and there are no words for it,” she said.
On Sunday, Angie Hamilton went to the Harris County event to help other people looking for loved ones and share her story. It’s the second time she assisted at the event.
Some relatives of missing people go to events like this as a coping mechanism. “It comforts to talk with other people that can understand me,” said Victor Solis, whose daughter, Maria Solis, was last seen alive by her family in 2003 after taking a bus to school. She was 16, and two years later, her remains were found in the Brazos River in Sugar Land.
Comforting people like Solis has become a cause for Angie Hamilton. On Sunday, she said, as part of her activism, she plans to host an informal gathering Thursday to bring awareness and attention to the cause of the missing. It will be held from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the parking lot of the Allendale Shopping Center at 2040 Richey St. in Pasadena.
Searching for Johnathan has been a daily struggle for his mother. Most of the time, she said, “I feel melted into the floor, but I grab whatever is left and try to put myself back together, just trying for a little bit longer. Every day. Over, and over, and over.”