Late last month, the mystery of missing person Gabby Petito, which gathered national media attention, seemed to have drawn to a close with the discovery of the body of Brian Laundrie, her boyfriend who was the only person of interest in the case. Before that, it seemed that there was not a day where you could turn on the TV and not see her face on the screen. Many people even tried sleuthing themselves and monitoring the case on social media. Virtually everyone was interested, or at least knew about, Gabby Petito.
However, there are so many other missing persons cases that go unheard of and have practically no media exposure at all.
Asher Chapman, founder of Missouri Missing, calls the issue “a silent epidemic.” She began Missouri Missing in 2007 after her daughter had gone missing four years prior.
While working with families dealing with missing loved ones through her organization for over 14 years, she learned first hand just how many missing persons cases don’t receive the amount of media attention as Gabby Petito had.
“There’s just so many cases, I know hundreds of families,” Asher Chapman said. “There’s so many cases that they just can’t get any attention.”
She knows all too well how it feels to have a loved one who is missing. Her daughter, Michelle, better known as Angie, has been missing for 18 years. She found that helping others has aided her own healing process.
“Every family that has a missing loved one, especially in the very beginning, the family is frantic. You can’t sleep. You can’t eat. It is insane how horrible it is. And I’ve done it a long time and personally, I have to do what I can to help other people, that helps me,” Asher Chapman said.
One such person who is also dealing with the pain of having a missing child is Paula Cosey Hill, who remarked on how the Gabby Petito case has affected her.
“Everybody who is missing loved ones is saying, ‘Why wasn’t my case done like that?’” said Paula Cosey Hill. “It’s very hard because it takes you back to when your child went missing.”
Her daughter, Shemika Cosey, went missing when she was 16 years old near her home in St. Louis, Missouri, a few days after Christmas back in 2008.
Seeing Gabby Petito’s case develop had been an “emotional rollercoaster” for her, as she simultaneously grieved for the Petito family while also reflecting on all the things which didn’t happen following her daughter’s disappearance.
“All the questions that weren’t answered with my daughter, I’m checking to see if they were doing it in that case,” said Cosey Hill. “When you report your loved one missing, you hear, ‘We’ll try to get someone on this,’ and they act as if they don’t have enough manpower to do it.”
“But as you can see, they can get enough manpower to do it,” she said. “They just choose which cases they want to do.”
“I don’t want to get emotional, but I put a little prayer in my heart, and I said, ‘Lord, what about Rajah?’” This was the reaction of Alicia Kirkland to the wide coverage of the Gabby Petito case, whose cousin, Rajah McQueen, has been missing since June. McQueen was seen last in a car in Cleveland, Ohio with her boyfriend.
“My heart goes out to Gabby’s families, but I do find a lot of similarities; they were both with boyfriends, there was domestic violence going on,” Kirkland said.
Despite all the commonalities, McQueen’s case was not given the same attention as Petito’s. Why is this occurring for so many missing persons cases?
“I struggle with saying this, but I’m going to say the hard thing. It’s also because she was a beautiful white woman, and I think in this country, we don’t think someone of color is equally as beautiful and has worth,” said Sylvia Colon, who works with families of missing loved ones in Cleveland, Ohio. She believes that the media is responsible for the lack of coverage of missing peoples of color and that more interviews are needed.
At the end of 2020, the FBI had over 89,000 active missing person cases, and 45% of those were people of color, according to the FBI’s National Crime Information Center (NCIC).
At the same, though, only about one-fifth of missing persons cases involving minorities are covered by news outlets, according to a 2016 analysis published in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology.
Natalie Wilson, co-founder of the Black and Missing Foundation, Inc., an online search agency that helps find Black and Hispanic children, says minority children who go missing are often considered runaways, which can lead to less media attention and less aid from law enforcement. Similarly, minority adults who go missing are classified as involved in crime, violence, poverty, or addiction.
The occurrence of the historically little attention paid to the missing persons cases of people of color was dubbed as “missing white woman syndrome” by late PBS anchor Gwen Ifill.
“We’ve been sounding the alarm for close to 14 years that this is an issue and we need to have that conversation, all of us, as to how we can change the narrative,” said Wilson. “We’re not surprised by the publicity or the reaction [to Gabby Petito’s disappearance] and we are also hoping and working to keep our missing in the forefront as well.”
If there is any good that can come from the disappearance and death of Gabby Petito, it is that this momentum gathered from her case could be used to shine light on other missing peoples, according to Asher Chapman.
“Many people think it’s unfair, and it is unfair to a lot of other families to a certain extent, but then again it’s opening avenues, it’s helping other people,” she said. “It might look subtle, but she’s helping so many people.”
Asher Chapman believes that there is a need for change, suggesting that communities become more involved. She says it’s as easy as simply sharing a flyer. “Share those flyers, it only takes a second. Every time it’s shared, that increases the chance that that person is found.”