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USA Today: Bill aims to help locate missing persons
Dec 10, 04:48 PM
By Nicklaus Lovelady and Chris Joyner, USA TODAY
Day and night, Margarite Owens recites a single question over and over, and no one is able to give her an answer. Where is her father?
Owens, 52, of Holly Bluff, Miss., has carried that frustrating question with her for more than two years since her 78-year-old father, Jessie Edwards, disappeared.
“You don’t just disappear off the face of the Earth in a small town like Holly Bluff,” Owens said. “Someone knows something.”
A measure working its way through Congress seeks to help people such as Owens by improving the way state and federal officials track the missing and keep family members informed.
“Billy’s Law,” sponsored by Rep. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., and named after Billy Smolinski, a 31-year-old man who disappeared in Waterbury, Conn., in 2004, would combine two Justice Department databases of missing people and unidentified remains, Murphy said.
The bill would require the FBI to share data on 98,058 unresolved missing persons cases from its National Crime Information Center database with the Department of Justice’s National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) to create a centralized database for all missing persons and unidentified cases that the public can access on the Internet.
There currently is no formal system for sharing information between the two databases, NamUs spokesman Todd Matthews said.
The number of missing listed in the FBI database has decreased in the past three years, but that is not an indication that the number of missing people is dropping, Matthews said. He says there are likely thousands more missing persons cases not recorded by the FBI, because not all law enforcement agencies report them to the FBI.
“It has been well over 100,000 before,” he said. “It really should be going up if we are fully utilizing the system.”
Matthews said the bill is designed primarily to enhance the ability to search for missing and unidentified adults. Federal law requires police to report missing children to the FBI database, but not missing adults or unidentified bodies. The FBI database is available to law enforcement, but not the public because it contains sensitive information on criminal investigations, he said.
Murphy has bipartisan support for the bill, which is in the House Judiciary subcommittee on crime. Supporters include Democrats Carolyn Maloney of New York and Bart Gordon of Tennessee and Republicans Ted Poe of Texas and Ed Whitfield of Kentucky, said Kristen Bossi, Murphy’s deputy chief of staff.
An initial hearing on the legislation should be held within a month, Murphy said. There is no companion legislation in the Senate, Bossi said.
Lovelady and Joyner report for The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss. Contributing: Jessica Leving, USA TODAY.
