Nearly 200 Pennsylvania children are reported missing

More than 14 weeks later, Sue Rinaldi still isn’t really sure howit happened. Her husband, Bill, and their adoptive son, Eric, were in their Scranton kitchen cooking homemade meatballs. It was the end of May; Eric turned 16 less than three months prior. The summer was just beginning.

By the end of that evening, Eric was gone. He took nothing with him. “I can tell he’s in really, really bad danger,” Sue Rinaldi said. The family filed a police report, but hasn’t found him. His missing poster is hosted online by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, one of 194 such posters in Pennsylvania.

“This poor kid, he had a future,” she said. “He loved basketball, he wanted to open up his own restaurants, he wanted to go back to school. ... He really had a plan. We just can’t understand how he up and disappeared like this.”

Of nearly 30,000 cases nationwide reported to the NCMEC in 2019, 91% were like Eric’s — endangered runaways — three-quarters of whom were 15-17 years old, according to NCMECdata.

In Pennsylvania, most of the 194 missing children in NCMEC’s database are from the Philadelphia or Pittsburgh regions. There are 10 from the seven-county Northeast Pennsylvania region, which comprises Lackawanna, Luzerne, Monroe, Pike, Susquehanna, Wayne and Wyoming counties.

Kingston police Chief Richard Kotchik said the majority of missing child reports his department investigates involve children who ran away because of something happening at home or who were at someone else’s house and came home late. Reports of abductions are far more rare. Even if the explanation is ultimately innocent, authorities treat it seriously.

“Wedogetsome,” Kotchik said. “They end up being a runaway or just that they didn’t come home at that time or were at a friend’s house.”

On average, about 1 in 6 of the nearly 23,600 runaway children reported to the NCMEClast year is likely the victim of sex trafficking, according to the organization.

“You could ask the man on the street the same question and get the same answer,” said Mary Ann LaPorta, executive director of the Children’s Advocacy Center of Northeastern Pennsylvania. “Are they at risk? Immensely at risk.”

At the CAC, in Scranton, victims of child abuse tell their stories to a forensic interviewer, which helps the police build a case against a suspected abuser. So far this year, they’ve seen 465 children come through their doors, LaPorta said. Last year, there were 731 children.

“We don’t have a percentage of runaways but when a child does run away, certainly 12 years old to teenagers, they’re at a much higher risk of human trafficking. ... One of the biggest threats to running away is being trafficked,” said Jordan Aebli, a forensic interviewer at the Scranton CAC.

Throughout Pennsylvania, CACs handled roughly 4,800 reports of child sexual abuse this year.

It’s something that Sue Rinaldi often worries about since Eric went missing. Eric was born Eric Wilson in March 2004. Three years ago, the Rinaldis adopted him because his biological parents were dealing with substance abuse issues. Eric is an “amazing kid,” Sue said.

“Very easygoing, willing to please everybody. Heis all around a really, really good boy,” she said. “He definitely is.”

However, Eric’s biological family continued to message him. The Rinaldis realized after Eric left just how much he had been in contact with his birth family. He had two Facebook accounts that his adoptive parents did not know about. It was like a “double life,” Sue said.

Investigators suspect Eric left to meet with his biological parents, former Scranton police Chief Carl Graziano said. However, his biological parents are homeless.

The NCMEC was founded in 1984, by child advocates and the parents of the slain child Adam Walsh as a national clearinghouse for information on missing and exploited children. They circulate photos of missing children, assist law enforcement organizations in finding them and provide resources and support for the families of those children.

The NCMEC acknowledges there is not a reliable way to determine the true number of how many children are actually missing because so many are never reported. While there were nearly 30,000 cases nationwide the NCMECassisted on last year, there were 421,394 entries in the NCIC for missing children. That number reflects reports of missing children. If a child runs away several times in one year, each time they do so is entered into NCIC as a new report.

Sue Rinaldi said she fears Eric may still be homeless, living out of a car somewhere in Monroe County with his biological parents. If she had a chance to speak with him, she’d tell him she loves and misses him and urge him to make smart decisions.

She said she hopes more awareness of those who are missing helps bring about a good ending for a family somewhere. “So many people like mewhofelt we were at the end of our ropes here and nobody wants to help us,” Rinaldi said.