It falls to police to track down missing children, but running away from home is not a crime in Maryland. Neither is harboring a runaway, regardless of the child's age. Sometimes, detectives say, they find that children had good reason to run. When they discover sexual or physical abuse, they call in social workers, who can place the child with a relative or in foster care.
Few cases receive broad public attention. One exception was the recent case of a 16-year-old District girl who disappeared from her private school in Kensington on Jan. 31. She was found two weeks later in Washington state with a 43-year-old man she had met on the Internet.
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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But most fall under the public radar, returning home on their own within a few days, Palardy said.
A Profile
Two out of every three runaways are girls. Palardy theorized that's because parents might be more likely to report a missing daughter or because girls often run off with older boyfriends.
Most Montgomery runaways are 15 or 16, and one-quarter of first-timers are younger than 12, according to the county's Operation Runaway Coalition, a group of government, health, school and police officials that meets monthly to discuss the problem.
Some teenagers call their parents periodically to let them know they're safe, while not revealing their whereabouts. Some have never been heard from again. The boxes that Palardy must check on a form to close a case remind her of the grim possibilities with any runaway.
For the condition in which the child was found, she usually checks the box next to "Alive-Unharmed." But other options include "Alive-Neglected," "Alive-Physically Abused," "Alive-Sexually Abused," "Deceased-Foul Play" and "Deceased-Suicide." Palardy and Kennedy said that, together, they've handled four cases in which missing teens were either murdered or killed in car accidents.
Nationwide, about 800,000 children were reported missing in 2003, an average of almost 2,200 every day, said Ben Ermini of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. That number has held fairly steady for the past five years, he said. Most of those are runaways, Ermini said, and many of the remaining ones are thought to be abducted by a parent in a custody fight or, in relatively rare cases, by a stranger.
Many, Palardy said, come from homes in which a single parent is working two or three jobs, leaving the child with less supervision. Some start out skipping school and escalate to skipping home, too. Some simply don't want to live by their parents' rules or want to be with an older boyfriend or girlfriend, Palardy said.
"The typical one is a child having some kind of problem, be it problems at home, drug problems, problems at school -- something -- and they need to get away, and they go to a friend's house," Palardy said.
Estela Lopes, 19, and Jackie Guerrero, 18, said they ran away repeatedly because they got involved with alcohol and drugs. They wanted to avoid parents who they feared would punish them.
"The first few times, I'd get tired of being in the streets," said Lopes.
Lopes said she ran away from her mother's Wheaton home and then group homes for teens nine times, starting when she was 14. She would get caught and then run again. "I felt I needed to do drugs to forget about embarrassing things I did. I knew if I went home I couldn't continue the drugs," she said.
Guerrero said she ran away from her mother's Rockville home 10 times, starting when she was 15. The young women, who shared hotel rooms paid for by men and slept in parks, are in a program for troubled teens at Kennedy's church in Prince George's County. Kennedy, who met them as runaway cases, said both girls are turning their lives around.
