Detectives Handle Stream of Cases
By Katherine Shaver
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 10, 2005
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.
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.
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.
But most fall under the public radar, returning home on their own within a few days, Palardy said.
A ProfileTwo 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.
Kennedy, who has been working with runaways for nine of his 22 years as an officer, and Palardy said they sympathize with parents about the obstacles they face in getting help for their runaway children. Even minors can't be forced into counseling or drug treatment without a judge's order, the detectives said.
Aquilla Rogers, who lives in Montgomery Village, said she is frustrated about what she believes is a lack of options to help her 14-year-old daughter, Adreanna, an honors student who has run away four times. This time, she said, her daughter has been missing for more than a month.
A county support group did nothing but expose her daughter to more experienced runaways, Rogers said, and Adreanna ran away again after her second meeting.
"I've basically been told there's no help unless I have $50,000 to send her to a private [drug treatment] program," Rogers said.
She said she's worried her daughter will turn to prostitution to support herself.
"Her answer to everybody was that she ran away because she wanted to have fun," Rogers said. "She said there were too many rules at home. . . . You worry every day, but at this point I can just pray."
A Tall CaseloadPalardy's cubicle in the Family Crimes Division in a red brick office complex off East Gude Drive in Rockville is full of neat stacks of paper-clipped packets. Each packet represents a missing child. Upon arriving at the office on a recent Monday morning, eight new cases greeted her.
"This, unfortunately, is my open [cases] pile," Palardy said, pointing to the tallest stack, six inches tall.
Palardy thumbed through the 25 cases. She said she's pretty sure where some of the children are, but she doesn't close the case until they are back home or living somewhere else with a parent's permission.
"He's back," she said, seeing a familiar name on a new runaway report. "He has a 30-year-old girlfriend, and he's 16."
Palardy usually begins an investigation by calling a parent or guardian to make sure the child hasn't returned home and to learn about his or her favorite hangouts. Most important, she tries to get the names and phone numbers of friends. Palardy said she is surprised that some parents can't recall the last name of anyone their child hangs around. But some have kept close tabs, routinely checking their children's cell phones to collect phone numbers of calls going in and out.
If an older child has his or her own cell phone, Palardy said, she'll often try calling it next.
One recent morning, Palardy called the cell phone of a missing 16-year-old Olney boy who she suspects is living with older friends from his job.
"Hey, it's Karen Palardy from Montgomery County police," she said, leaving a message. "I know you left home, and I talked to your mom. I just want to talk to you about what's going on at home and why you left."
She hung up. "He's not going to call me back," she said. Why does she think that? "It's just a feeling," she said, shrugging.
She called the six friends whose names were supplied by the boy's mother, leaving messages asking them to get their friend to call home or call her.
"This boy thinks he can be on his own, but he doesn't realize everyone isn't going to keep putting him up for free," Palardy said.
She usually puts together a flier with a missing youth's photo and physical description and hands it out to neighbors or posts it in restaurants or stores where the teen hangs out. Sometimes, Palardy said, the bold headline of "Missing Child" over the photo embarrasses teenagers enough that they return on their own.
She also checks school attendance records to see if the child is simply avoiding home or dropping out of life altogether.
Every child reported missing is entered into a national database. That way, if children are picked up for shoplifting or pulled over in a traffic stop, police will know they are reported runaways. It also allows police to take runaways into custody and take them home, but Palardy said they try to persuade most to return voluntarily.
"We have cases where we can drag them home, but if they go home on their own, they're ready," Palardy said. "They might be willing to get help or listen to their parents. But if we bring them home, they're angry."
Palardy estimated that one-third to half of the cases she sees are about kids who have run away before. One 13-year-old who had run away seven times recently returned home with Palardy's help, took a shower, changed clothes and took off again two hours later.
Palardy said other police officers have told her that the frustration of seeing the same runaways repeatedly has discouraged them from wanting to investigate missing children cases.
But Palardy, a 20-year veteran who has been working with runaways for four years, said she enjoys talking with young people. She said she tries to remind herself that -- perhaps slowly, but eventually -- 10 to 30 percent of the kids she tracks down will get help or simply outgrow the problem that made them run. That, she said, is its own success.