It was the scariest call Tonya Wingfield had ever received.
Her daughter Ashleigh, 14, had disappeared shortly after Wingfield dropped her off at her private school the morning of Jan. 10, the headmaster told her. The girl had last been seen talking to a 16-year-old boy from another school. Apparently they left together.
When Tonya Wingfield's daughter disappeared from school, she mobilized friends and others to help.
(Marvin Joseph -- The Washington Post)
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For more than 24 hours, Wingfield searched for her daughter. She called Ashleigh's cell phone but got no answer. She called the cell phone carrier and found that the phone had been used several times to call the boy's friends. She called 911 but was told that police wouldn't search for Ashleigh because it appeared that she had left school voluntarily.
So Wingfield called in her own network: civic leaders, school activists, police officers she had met through years of involvement in her Prince George's County community. Ultimately, it was one of her contacts who found Ashleigh in the District on Tuesday morning.
Wingfield's experience underscores the difficulty that parents often face when they seek help from law enforcement finding a child who might have run away. Unlike child abduction cases, where police mobilize immediately, runaway cases draw less effort, authorities said.
The U.S. Justice Department estimates that 800,000 children are reported missing to police agencies each year -- about 2,200 each day. Ben Ermini of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Arlington said that the majority of the cases reported to his agency involve runaways. Most return home within 24 to 48 hours, Ermini said, leading law enforcement officials to eschew searches that are costly and take officers away from other tasks.
Ermini said federal legislation was passed 15 years ago directing police to take reports immediately on any missing children under age 18, including runaways. Under the law, that information must be entered into the National Crime Information Center, a computerized database of victims and criminals maintained by the FBI.
That doesn't mean they start to search immediately. Retta Williams Jeffers had to mobilize her own search when her 11-year-old son went missing in Southeast Washington in October 1994. D.C. police refused to initiate a search for 72 hours, saying the boy probably had run away. So she recruited neighbors, including residents of a nearby halfway house, to look for him. The halfway house residents found him 2 1/2 days after he disappeared, less than 100 yards from where he had been snatched by convicted child molester Contee Stevenson.
"They can't assume that every child who disappears ran away just because someone didn't see them get abducted," Jeffers said in an interview last week.
Even if her daughter left voluntarily, Wingfield said, that didn't mean she was safe.
"You don't know who she is going to encounter," said Wingfield, who owns a computer consulting company in Upper Marlboro. "They may have made the choice to go on their own, but acting on that choice could mean that they come upon a murderer or a molester or someone else who could victimize them."
When she discovered that her daughter was not at Lanham Christian School, Wingfield immediately conducted a search of the area around the school and canvassed the neighborhood trying to find her.
Prince George's police did not come to her home to take a report until she contacted a friend on the police force who called a supervisor, she said. At that point, officers interviewed her and visited the home of the boy with whom Ashleigh had last been seen. The boy said he didn't know where she was.
Wingfield then mobilized friends to search for her daughter. Phil Lee, a community activist and former police officer, helped coordinate with law enforcement. Wingfield's mother and nephew called acquaintances. Friends rode through neighborhoods. An e-mail was sent to hundreds of people. Fliers were posted and disseminated to businesses.
Lt. Edward Walters, investigative commander of the police district involved in Ashleigh's case, said more than half of the 650 missing person cases reported to his station last year involved young runaways. While police officers are required to take a report and assess every missing child case, only the children who are believed to be in danger or are under age 13 or mentally or physically disabled are automatically classified as "critical missing persons."
Police said the sheer numbers limit their ability to search for suspected runaways.
"It would be very difficult to search for all of those kids," Walters said.
Ashleigh Wingfield knew her mother was trying to reach her: The cell phone kept ringing. The boy she left school with urged her to answer it, "but I was afraid that I would be in trouble," she recalled in an interview Tuesday.
She said she spent Monday with her friend, hanging out at his school in Laurel and meeting his friends. When the boy's father picked him up, Ashleigh went home with a group of his friends. Afraid to face her mother, she said, she ended up sleeping in a cold van.
The next morning, she boarded the Metrorail and started riding, unsure about what she should do next, she said. About 8:20, she was standing on the platform at L'Enfant Plaza when a friend of her mother's walked by. Aware of the search for Ashleigh, he took the girl into his office cafeteria for breakfast and called her mother, Tonya Wingfield recounted.
At home later, Ashleigh said she wouldn't advise anyone to do what she did. "I would tell them to think it through really carefully -- where they're going to stay, what they're going to eat, what they would do," she said. "Because if they really think it through, they would realize it is really stupid." Staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.
