FOUND, thank God!
Emi is safely home.
******************
Yesterday a child didn’t go home after school.
Her parents are, of course, very worried. If you know her or her whereabouts, please contact her mother through the link above. If you don’t know anything, please go ahead and follow that link and share the post.
Back in January my daughter put me through the worst week of my life. On her return, I learned that she’d left her phone in her room on silent. I thought it fair to tell her to listen to all the weeping voicemails I’d left her when I thought she might hear or answer.
Instead she deleted them unheard. They made her feel bad.
This young lady, Emi, is a beloved friend of my daughter. If I had my wish, Emi would be found safe as of yesterday, but I sure wouldn’t mind if that news didn’t get to Hope for a few days.
And I don’t exactly feel bad about that.
Oh, and before I get all the judgmental “are you sure this is real?” crap, have a dose of reality.
- The police don’t put out public information when you report a missing teen. They don’t even take a goddamn picture unless you force it on them. They’re not actually looking–they’ll just pick her up if they happen to notice her. Which, remember, they don’t have a picture. So they’d have to ask her name, and she’d have to not lie.
- The media (tv, newspaper, radio) won’t put out a missing teen report unless the police tell them to. At least, that’s the response I got when I tried to get help searching for Hope.
- Most people just shrug at the news of “another” missing teen. Yes, she probably will be home soon, mostly safe and mildly repentant. But in the meantime she is almost certainly in a highly unsafe situation and in need of adult protection. Most runaways make it home. Many don’t. They all matter, damn it.
*hugs tight* I’ll be praying that this one comes home safe, too. And that it doesn’t take the hard way for your girl to learn about consequences.
Thank you. 🙁
I wonder if police response has to do with geographic location or changes over time, because in 1999 the police picked my ass up so fast my mother didn’t even know I was gone.
That would be…a pretty significant difference, yes. In January my daughter ran away. I called the police, told them all I knew, told them her friends thought she was with another runaway, A. Less than twelve hours later, police spotted A outside her hideout, looking for smokeable cigarette butts. A 15yo out at four in the morning? They stopped, questioned her, and picked her up. MY 15yo was passed out drunk inside the house–but they didn’t even check. Just asked A if anyone was with her, and took her word for it when she lied. I know they need a warrant to go in (or they’re supposed to) but I’m pretty sure they could have knocked on the door. Considering how fast the stoner sheltering Hope gave her up when I’d tracked him down, I bet if the cops knocked at four a.m. to give him hell for sheltering a runaway, I’d have had my daughter back four days sooner. And who knows? Maybe some spineless bastard who makes friends by sharing his “medical” marijuana, cigarettes, and booze with 13/14yos would be in jail where he belongs.