Why Texas girl's case is one of the rarest
Most missing children located within days
It’s one of the worst-case scenarios for a missing child: An 11-year-old Texas girl is found dead and a man who was supposed to drop her off at a school bus is charged in her murder.
Audrii Cunningham’s body was found Tuesday in the Trinity River, Polk County Sheriff Byron Lyons told reporters. Don Steven McDougal, 42, who Lyons said lives in a trailer on the family’s property, was held without bond on a capital murder charge in connection to her death, according to Polk County
Jail records.
The tragic case in Texas, which prompted an Amber Alert and national coverage, represents one of the rarest kinds of missing children cases. The vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of children reported missing in the United States each year are found and very few are abducted by people other than family members or given an Amber Alert.
And while each case is troubling, how much attention they receive from law enforcement, the media and the public can vary widely based on a number of factors. Among them are race, age and the circumstances of their disappearance, according to Gaetane Borders, president of Peas in Their Pods, which has advocated for missing children of color since 2007.
“When every child goes missing, it should be urgent for everyone to assist,” Borders said. “But the reality is that it’s far more difficult for children of color to get the same level of attention as Audrii or (Gabby) Petito and so forth and so on.”
About 460,000 children go missing in the United States each year, according to the U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. There were more than 30,500 active missing persons records for children under the age of 18 in the National Crime Information Center in December 2022.
In Texas, there were 3,144 children reported missing to the National Cen
ter for Missing & Exploited Children in 2022, the highest number of any state. Nearly 90% of those cases were resolved, according to NCMEC.
At least 46 other children across the country went missing in the week since Cunningham’s disappearance, including 3-year-old Elijah Vue in Wisconsin, 14-year-old Maxine Pontious in Texas, 17-year-old Christian Spencer in Massachusetts and 15-year-old Princess Huertas in North Carolina, according to NCMEC’s database of missing posters.
Children who ran away and family abductions are the two most common cases reported to NCMEC. An abduction in which a child is taken by someone known to but not related to them or by a stranger, called a “nonfamily abduction,” is the rarest type of case, accounting for just 1% of such cases reported to NCMEC.
According to NCMEC, 98% of children reported missing are located within days. Of those who are not, most are Black.
“Although a lot of the kids are found, the numbers definitely are disturbing as to how many are still left unfound,” Borders said.
NCMEC found thousands of children have been recovered after being missing for six months or longer. But the longer children are missing, the more likely they could be harmed. A 2006 study from the Washington state attorney general’s office and U.S. Department of Justice of nearly 800 cases of missing children who were later found dead determined the child was killed within three hours in 76% of cases and within a day in 88.5%.
Contributing: Natalie Neysa Alund, Amaris Encinas, Gina Barton, Doug Caruso, Rachel Looker, Tami Abdollah, Ashley Luthern and Madison Scott, USA TODAY