Data: Few open cases of missing toddlers in state
Missing Ansonia child’s case is uncommon
ANSONIA — Vanessa Morales, who turned 3 years old this week, should have rang in her birthday with friends and family. Instead, the Ansonia toddler is one of three missing children since 1971 to disappear in the state at such a young age, a Hearst Connecticut Media analysis found.
It had been less than three months since Vanessa’s first birthday when she was reported missing during the December 2019 murder of her mother, Christine Holloway.
Jose Morales, the child’s father, was subsequently arrested and has pleaded
not guilty to murder and tampering with evidence; he has not been charged in his daughter’s disappearance and told police he was uninvolved, according to arrest records.
A Hearst Connecticut
“Of our case load that we end up assisting with — around just over 30,000 cases per year — a majority, 92 percent, are runaway-type cases, where the children are believed to have left on their own.” John Bischoff, vice president for the Missing Children Division at the the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
analysis showed Vanessa is the only child to go missing as an infant or toddler and not be found in the last 20 years, according to data from the National Missing and Unidentified Person System, an information clearinghouse and resource center for missing, unidentified and unclaimed person cases.
Experts agree that cases involving kids around Vanessa’s age, around 1 to 3 years old, are highly unusual.
“When you come down to it, those are rare,” said John Rabun, the former chief operating officer of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, who specializes in infant and toddler cases.
Roughly 7 percent of the state’s open missing children cases from the last 50 years are among infants and toddlers, the National Missing and Unidentified Person System data showed.
The public information office of the Connecticut State Police said its reporting database is not configured to differentiate missing persons cases into specific age groups.
Rabun said in the under 3 age group, missing children generally fall into two categories.
“One would be parental kidnapping,” he said. “The other would be — I don’t want to call them ‘runaway’ because that’s willful — but ‘wander away’ would be a better term.”
Cases of children who went missing on their own are more common among the oldest kids. For comparison, more than three-quarters of missing children in the state were teenagers when they disappeared, the analysis found.
The trend in Connecticut resembles what national organizations have observed in recent years across the United States.
“Of our case load that we end up assisting with — around just over 30,000 cases per year — a majority, 92 percent, are runawaytype cases, where the children are believed to have left on their own,” said John Bischoff, the vice president for the Missing Children Division at the the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Bischoff added family abductions make up about 5 to 6 percent of the national center’s caseload.
David Finkelhor, the director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, said the age distribution for family abduction tends to be between 3 and 11 years old.
“That’s because younger children are quite burdensome to take care of,” he said, “so the disaffected parent oftentimes, a majority of them who are men, feel unequipped to take a child that young.”
Finkelhor also noted that children are usually found shortly after their disappearances.
“The vast majority of all missing children episodes are brief, and that’s true about family abductions, too,” he said.
Roughly half of familyabducted children are missing for less than a week, while about a fourth are missing for less than a day, according to a guide put together for the nonprofit Center for Problem-Oriented Policing.
Morales was last seen by family members in late November 2019. She has never been found, despite sightings of children who resembled her in Bridgeport and California.
On Dec. 2, Morales’s mom, Christine Holloway, 43, failed to show up for work at a daycare. Police, responding to her home for a welfare check, found Holloway beaten to death. Her daughter was not in the home.
That month, police named Vanessa Morales’s father, Jose Morales, as a suspect in her disappearance and Holloway’s death. He was charged with the latter in February 2020, and pleaded not guilty the following month.
The supervisory assistant state’s attorney told the judge in May he was in the process of providing discovery evidence to the defense.
“Extensive efforts are being taken by local law enforcement to run those leads down,” Howard Stein, the prosecutor, said at the time. “And they are to this point, of course, all negative.”
Jose Morales is scheduled to appear on Oct. 27 in Milford Superior Court.