Families of missing people gather in search of loved ones
It’s been well over a year since 16-year-old Kristen Galvan went missing from her grandmother’s house in Spring, and her mother, Robyn Bennett, has exhausted every option to find her — she’s hired a private investigator, organized billboard campaigns and still calls the police every day for updates.
Still, Bennett wanted to participate in the Texas Center for the Missing’s annual “Missing in Harris County Day” on Saturday, if for no other reason than to feel the support of other people who understand the hurt of having a family member vanish.
“I can call some of the other mothers, or whoever’s on the panel who are missing children as well, and I can talk to them, and they know what I’m going through,” Bennett said. “This is an open wound, this is every parent’s worst nightmare.”
The Texas Center for the Missing has been running Missing in Harris County Day since 2015, when the group took it over from the Harris County Institute for Forensic Sciences. The event, which was initially going to be hosted in person, was moved online at the last minute when Harris County returned to the highest COVID-19 threat level.
Since 2015, Missing in Harris County Day has led to six missing people being returned safely to their families and 13 more being identified after their deaths, the center said.
Over 10,500 people were reported missing last year in Harris County, 7,355 of whom were children, according to statistics the center received from the Texas Department of Public Safety.
While the department could not be reached for comment Saturday as to how many of those people were recovered, Harris County Reserve Officer Denise O’Leary said that 3,355 were under the jurisdiction of the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, which resolved 3,332 cases last year. O’Leary was careful to note, however, that the cases resolved in 2020 could have included people who had gone missing in years prior.
Best practices
The Center for the Missing kicked off Saturday’s events with a panel featuring law enforcement officers from various jurisdictions in Harris County, who explained the best ways to help investigators find loved ones. They urged family members to be honest with everything they knew about the missing person, even if it involved illicit activities, and to try and track down any digital information the person may have that would otherwise be unavailable without a warrant.
“If the family is not up front from the beginning, that can deter which way the investigation goes, and when you have a missing person, time is critical,” O’Leary said. “Law enforcement is not here to judge the family.”
Afterwards, families of missing people gathered in a public panel to discuss their experiences searching for loved ones, trading tips as to what did or didn’t work. Alice Almendarez and David Fritts discussed the “John and Joseph Law” — named after Almendarez’s father and Fritts’ son, respectively — which was signed by Gov. Greg Abbott on June 4.
The new law will require any agency that receives a missing person report to enter the case into the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs, within 60 days of receiving the report, and require medical examiners and justices of the peace to do the same for unidentified dead bodies.
‘I didn’t know what to do’
Almendarez’s father, John, went missing in June 2002 and was found dead in Buffalo Bayou a month later. He was listed as an unidentified Hispanic male in the morgue for two years before being buried, and it wasn’t until 12 years later, when Almendarez contacted the database and offered her DNA, that a match came up and she received confirmation of her father’s death.
“I realized there had to be something done and more people had to know about NamUs. They asked HPD why I wasn’t told about NamUs in 2010 when I filed another missing persons report, and they said, ‘Well, she didn’t ask,’ ” Almendarez said. “Well, I didn’t know to ask … I didn’t know what to do or who to go to anymore.”
In Kristen Galvan’s case, Bennett is sure that her daughter is not dead but being trafficked. The latest development came in March, when she was told an ad for her daughter was seen online in Atlanta. Since then, she hasn’t heard a peep, she said, but still she calls every day.
“Somebody has to have seen her, or know where Kristen is,” Bennett said. “Somebody picked her up that night, and we need to find her.”