Montgomery County police detectives Karen Palardy and Victor Kennedy handed two young men and a woman a colorful photo of a 16-year-old girl standing next to a Christmas tree.
She had been missing for nine days, and the detectives asked the group whether they had seen her. The officers knew that the girl had friends in a group house where the three young people lived near downtown Silver Spring.
Detectives Victor Kennedy and Karen Palardy follow a lead in Silver Spring in their search for a missing teenager. County police handled about 1,800 cases of runaways last year. Children as young as 10 have fled, and they have been found as far away as Hawaii. Many run away more than once.
(Photos Ricky Carioti -- The Washington Post)
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They knew her, said one of the men, who had spiky hair and a small, silver bar running through the pierced bridge of his nose. But he didn't want to talk to a cop without a lawyer, he said.
The detectives were losing patience.
"We've seen a few kids over the years end up with a tag on their toe. See what I'm sayin'?" Kennedy said.
Try down the street, the group told the detectives. One of the girl's friends lives there.
A few minutes later, Palardy and Kennedy drove out of the neighborhood feeling hopeful. A man at the house down the street said the girl was a friend of his daughter's, and he had seen her two days earlier. If he spoke with her again, the man promised, he would call the detectives.
"That was very productive," Kennedy said as they rode to City Place mall to search for another missing girl seen there two days earlier with an older man. "The fact that she's been seen recently, that's very productive."
As Palardy put it, "We know she's alive."
Consider it a small, if far from complete, victory in the search for Montgomery County's runaways. About 1,800 cases involving runaways were investigated by police last year. It's up to Palardy, Kennedy and Detective Brenda Alexander, their colleague in the Police Department's Missing Children Section, to find them.
"It's not typical police work," Palardy said. "But if we get these kids back home, there's less of a chance they'll be a victim of a crime or get involved in crime."
They knock on doors, hand out photos and frequent shopping malls and other teen hangouts. But with an average of 600 cases apiece every year, they spend much of their time on phones and computers, following a trail from anxious parents to the runaway's friends and boyfriend or girlfriend.
The unit has tracked down Montgomery runaways living as far away as Hawaii. Some were working for Internet escort services or had joined violent gangs. Montgomery children as young as 10 have fled their homes. They often leave over and over again. One 16-year-old girl has run away from her mother's Chevy Chase home 40 times in the past two years.
The goal, the detectives said, is not only to return the child home but also to point the family toward counseling, drug treatment or other help.
