Parents locate teen by cloud storage
Photo geotagging led to location of missing daughter
Dedra Sykes had a mother’s intuition about her daughter, who disappeared almost two months ago.
She said she would see the teen again. She said technology would lead them to 14-year-old Jennifer Lee Willis. She predicted that the family would locate the girl before police.
Her mother wit proved accurate this week, when Jennifer was found by the family and taken to a hospital. Now they’re working to help her recover from the weeks-long ordeal.
“We shouldn’t have to find our own child,” Sykes said.
The teen first vanished in April after she was punished for talking to strangers in an online chat room. Her parents found her the next day in their Hiram Clarke neighborhood on Houston’s south side.
She was gone again on May 5, and the Houston Police Department classified her as a runaway.
Thanks to cloud photo storage, however, the family maintained hope that Jennifer was alive.
Photos and video the girl uploaded on her phone kept showing up on a tablet through a joint family account over the last seven weeks.
Her parents could see she looked thinner and was wearing makeup and an adult hairstyle, with a long weave or wig and blond highlights. Some of the videos suggested the teen, who has behavioral and mental health diagnoses, might have been exploited by adults.
Some of the uploaded content include geomapping that helped Jennifer’s parents stay on her trail.
“They would only come up sometimes, and when we would get to the locations, we would just miss her,” Sykes said.
The latest photo popped up around 1 p.m. Thursday.
“She posted a picture, and we pulled up the location,” Sykes said.
They rushed to a budget motel off Beltway 8 between Westheimer and
Richmond.
“There was a guy outside, and we showed him her picture, and he said she just left and went to the store,” Sykes said. “She was right down the street.”
Cautious, they hid in their vehicle to avoid tipping off their daughter.
Jennifer’s father, Lee Allen Willis — a boxerturned-personal trainer — speedwalked the less than half a mile from the motel to the convenience store in a Chevron gas station. He saw Jennifer at the Burger King inside, and they scuffled.
Her mother showed up moments later and called 911.
“The people in the store, they don’t know what’s happening,” Sykes said. “He goes to try to help her, and these people are trying to help Jennifer get away. It’s like a little physical brawl. Then he showed them paperwork. Now we’re in a dangerous situation because whoever has her, we don’t know how bad they want to keep her. She was not alone. She was with some other girls.”
As they waited for paramedics and police, Sykes said several people approached and threatened her.
“They asked me if that was her dad or a police informant,” she said.
When a Houston police officer arrived, Sykes said, the officer focused on Jennifer and did not immediately interview the people at the motel room or others who made threats.
The officer handcuffed Jennifer and put her in the back of the police car for safekeeping before the trip to a hospital.
Sykes said she has lost faith in HPD and the people in charge of finding runaways or missing minors like Jennifer.
The family got little assistance in tracking the digital fingerprints that could have led them to the teen sooner, she said.
HPD spokesman John Cannon, however, said the missing persons unit had been in frequent contact with Sykes and Willis and that police followed up on the teen’s posted videos and photos.
A lead missing persons investigator worked the case by interviewing Jennifer’s school friend, also a neighbor, who said she “had been with her as recently as three weeks ago” but denied knowledge of the missing teen’s whereabouts, Cannon said Friday.
Police said earlier this month they believed the teen may have been sneaking into her home to shower and eat when her parents and siblings were away.
Two-thirds of the 566 lost and missing people reported to HPD in April were children, according to a Chronicle review of missing persons reports.
The month’s cases included 157 missing juveniles, 231 runaway minors and 178 missing adults.
Most are located in short order, though Houston police don’t maintain an active list of individual cases. A few never return home, lost to the streets or to the morgue.
In Jennifer’s case, her parents were the sleuths who solved the case by finding their daughter alive.
“We were giving them the leads,” Sykes said. “They’re still failing us. They need to be interrogating and finding out: Who are these people? There might be other young ladies in trouble over there.”