It's been five weeks since two Indiana teenagers were dropped off at a Chicago bus station and disappeared to travel "like gypsies" to an unknown destination.
Shelbie Rasberry (left) and Shelby Jacks have been missing since Aug. 3.
Best friends Shelbie Rasberry and Shelby Jacks reportedly crafted a carefully orchestrated plan to run away with the help of other friends. Someone else bought the pair their bus tickets, while one or two other friends drove them to Chicago, and there was a going away party for Rasberry and Jacks, according to Gas City police.
But the teenagers' parents didn't get a whiff of their plans until they were gone, and now all they want is a phone call to know that the two young women are safe.
"She knows what this is doing to me. She knows this is killing me," said Rasberry's mom Denise Fieramusca. "We have to go to bed every night not knowing if our kids are alive or dead."
Jacks and Rasberry disappeared from Gas City, Indiana on Aug. 3. The last confirmed sighting of the teens occurred a few days later at a soup kitchen in the Twin Cities area. Since then, the police and the girls' parents have no idea where they've gone.
Jacks' mom believes her daughter is headed to Washington state to satisfy her burgeoning fondness for pot. The state possibly holds some allure because voters there this fall will decide in a referendum if weed should be legal.
"She's hung up on this smoking pot thing," Barbara Miller told The Huffington Post from her Tennessee home. "I feel sick. I've been looking every day and looking and looking. I have nothing to go by now. I've lost track of her."
Though Jacks lives with her father, Miller said she's extremely close with her daughter, who turned 17 on Monday. Miller said Jacks might have left because she was recently arrested for allegedly driving under the influence after drinking and smoking.
It's part of a rebellious phase that began last school year when Jacks was a sophomore, Miller said, during which Jacks was suspended for skipping class.
Rasberry, 16, has never been in trouble, her mother said, but she's been close friends with Jacks since they were 10. Rasberry wouldn't have let Jacks leave home alone, even though it was bound to upset her family, her mother said.
Though she didn't know it before Rasberry ran away, Fieramsuca said she has recently learned that her daughter regularly gets stoned too. Rasberry and Jacks allegedly envisioned rambling across the country "like gypsies," according to snippets Fieramusca said she's heard from the teens' friends.
The tip that the teens, who've been friends since they were 10, might wind up in Washington started with the one time they've gotten in touch with another friend from high school since their disappearance. Jacks and Rasberry used a stranger's cellphone to call a friend in Indiana. The unnamed friend showed the cellphone number to police. Cops called and reached a man who said the girls told him they're hitchhiking to Washington.
"They're young teenagers, so maybe they wanted to show some independence," Gas City Police Chief Kirk McCollum told HuffPost. "Our concern is that they went out on their own...the potential danger that's out there, especially with two young girls."
Fieramusca and Miller believe that their daughters' friends know more about their disappearance than they've let on. Each mom expressed frustration that police have been unable to pry any specific details from other teens who may have been involved in the disappearance.
Tracking Rasberry and Jacks has been difficult because they left their cellphones at home and haven't updated their Facebook accounts. Each teen left a note for their family, and Jacks' letter allegedly said that the pair does not plan to return until they turn 18. Each teen wrote that they would get in touch soon, but it's been about five weeks since they left.
"That's what's scaring us the most," said Fieramusca. "The fact that there hasn't been any calls at all."
Rasberry is 5 foot 5 inches tall and weighs 135 pounds. She has black hair and blue-green eyes. She has braces, a heart tattoo on her right wrist, and piercings in her nose, lip, tongue and ears.
Jacks is 5 foot 6 inches tall and weights 110 pounds. She has blond hair, blue eyes and numerous piercings.
Anyone with information should call the Gas City Police Department at (765) 674-2278.
Businesses in the hometown of an Ohio woman who vanished during a North Carolina vacation are offering more than $7,000 in rewards for details about the location of the woman or her boyfriend.
Police officers say 33-year-old Lynn Jackenheimer, of Ashland, went to the Outer Banks last week with her boyfriend, Nate Summerfield, and her two children but didn't return with them. Summerfield's brother called police to say Summerfield told him he strangled the woman.
Authorities said Summerfield returned his girlfriend's children to Ohio and left them with his family. Jackenheimer has been missing since July 4.
Police are seeking for Summerfield, who's being defined as a person of interest.
Investigators and their vehicles massed in front of a building at Prince and Wooster Streets
in SoHo on Thursday morning in their search for traces of Etan Patz in the basement.
F.B.I. Renews Search in Etan Patz Case in SoHo Basement.
Investigators equipped with jackhammers entered the basement of a building in SoHo on Friday morning, starting the second day of the most extensive search to date for the remains of Etan Patz, a 6-year-old boy whose disappearance more than 30 years ago focused national attention on the problem of missing children.
Before the work began, Con Edison crews turned off utilities in the area where the search was being conducted. A law enforcement official at the scene said the goal was to remove an entire floor in the basement.
Officials said they would dig for five days, a much more extensive effort than was made 12 years ago, when detectives searched the basement of an apartment where the primary suspect, Jose A. Ramos, a former mental patient who was serving time for molesting a boy in Pennsylvania, lived when Etan disappeared.
The new search focused on a basement area that had been used as a workshop by a carpenter and handyman from Etan’s building. Investigators are working on the theory that the handyman, Othniel Miller, killed the boy and buried him there, one law enforcement official said.
In recent days, according to the law enforcement official, Mr. Miller was interviewed by agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and when the possibility was raised that the boy had been buried in the basement, he blurted out, “What if the body was moved?” the official said.
Investigators from the Police Department and the F.B.I. spent much of Thursday dismantling shelving in the basement, in a seven-story building less than a block from where Etan lived with his parents, Stanley and Julie Patz (rhymes with plates). The walls were to be checked for traces of blood, and the concrete floor was to be excavated.
“I think that there is guarded optimism that they’re going to find something,” an official said.
The search signaled a revival of a case that changed the rhythms and routines of a generation, and that Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney, said in 2010 he would reopen. In the wake of headlines and a widespread search, many parents stopped letting children go to the school bus stop by themselves. Etan, a first grader who was wearing sneakers and an Eastern Airlines pilot’s cap, had pleaded with his parents that he was old enough to make the trip alone. He disappeared on the first day he was allowed to do so.
The basement being searched — at 127B Prince Street, at the corner of Wooster Street — had also been used by the SoHo Playgroup, a parent-led space for preschool children. A woman who had participated in the group as a child said she believed Etan was a member of the playgroup.
The basement is along the route Etan was to have followed that morning in May 1979. Somewhere between his parents’ loft at 113 Prince Street and the bus stop, on West Broadway, he disappeared.
Since then, the timeline of the case has been filled with despair. In the days after he vanished, parents tacked up posters in SoHo, and later his photograph was printed on milk cartons in hopes of jarring memories and generating leads.
On Thursday, officials cordoned off the corner, stretching a blue tarpaulin between the basement entrance and the back of one of the police vans. Onlookers took pictures as investigators milled beneath signs for boutiques like Lucky Brand, WiNK and Fred Perry, which now occupy the corner.
The stores and tourists threw into dramatic relief just how different SoHo is today than at the time of the boy’s disappearance, when it was gritty and largely empty, with many of the former light-manufacturing buildings now occupied by artists. It was almost as though those taking pictures were witnessing a dig into a distant epoch, one that felt far further in the past than 33 years.
In fact, the corner at the time had been home to the cooperative restaurant Food, one of the only places to eat in a neighborhood now jammed with expensive dining options.
The current search is largely being conducted by an F.B.I. evidence recovery team as part of a joint investigation by agents from the bureau and the Police Department’s missing persons and cold case squads. Archaeologists from the medical examiner’s office were also on hand.
Three law enforcement officials said that investigators had brought a cadaver-sniffing dog to the basement within the last few weeks and that the dog had indicated the possibility of remains.
F.B.I. agents were seen escorting Mr. Miller to his apartment in Brooklyn on Thursday afternoon; a law enforcement official said investigators had tried to elicit information from him.
A grandson of Mr. Miller’s, Tony Miller, on Friday dismissed any suggestion that his grandfather might be a suspect in Etan’s death.
“I don’t think he could have done anything like this,” Mr. Miller, 33, said in an interview outside his grandfather’s house. “That’s not in his character. Ever since I’ve known him, he’s always been a good, hard-working man. He helped to straighten me out and guide me when I was a kid.”
Mr. Miller, a trucker who lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant, said that the first time he heard about the Patz case was from watching television news on Thursday.
“He never told me about it,” Mr. Miller said of his grandfather.
Asked how his grandfather was responding to the renewed police attention and to the extensive news media presence outside his home, Mr. Miller said: “He’s taking this real hard. He had a stroke, he’s diabetic, he’s not in good condition. This is really hard for him.”
More than a decade ago, Mr. Miller invited the police to come in and examine the basement, suggesting that they could tear up the floor if they wanted, but that they would have to pay to replace it, a person involved in the inquiry at the time said. Because Mr. Miller was not a suspect, they did not take him up on his offer, the person said.
Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the police, said investigators would tear apart the 13-by-62-foot space, removing drywall and searching the cinder-block walls underneath. He also said they would break through the concrete floor.
No criminal charges have ever been filed in Etan’s death or disappearance.
When Etan vanished, the police assigned 30 officers and 5 detectives to the case and began what a deputy inspector called a “floor-by-floor, wall-by-wall, rooftop-by-rooftop, backyard-by-backyard search.” They also called in helicopters and bloodhounds.
Within a week, the police contingent had grown to 300 officers and detectives. They were handling 500 calls a day from people who said they had seen Etan or had ideas about how to crack the case. But nothing panned out, and two months after he disappeared, the missing persons squad said it had been the longest search for a missing child in New York in decades.
In 1983, President Ronald Reagan declared May 25 — the day on which Etan had vanished four years before — National Missing Children’s Day.
In 2001, Etan was declared legally dead. His family filed a wrongful-death suit against Mr. Ramos, the man convicted of abuse in Pennsylvania; in 2004, a Manhattan judge ruled that Mr. Ramos had been responsible for Etan’s death. But the authorities said they never had enough evidence to file criminal charges against him in Etan’s case.
Mr. Ramos has been in prison in Pennsylvania since 1987 and is scheduled to be released on Nov. 7. He has been denied parole nine times in the last 13 years. Leo Dunn, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole, said Mr. Ramos’s last parole review, in July 2009, referred to a “negative recommendation” from the Department of Corrections and said he would pose “a risk to the community.”
In 2000, the police searched the basement of the building at 234 East Fourth Street on the Lower East Side where Mr. Ramos was living when Etan disappeared. Investigators carted out an old coal-fired furnace along with barrels of ash and dirt from the basement floor.
Mr. Ramos was said to have admitted that he was with Etan the day he vanished, but denied abducting and killing him.
Etan’s father, Stanley Patz, did not return a call for comment on Thursday.
TUCSON, Ariz. — The overnight disappearance of a 6-year-old Arizona girl triggered a massive search Saturday by scores of police, FBI agents and a large contingent of deputy U.S. Marshals as officials investigated the possibility that she was kidnapped or just wandered off.
First-grader Isabel Mercedes Celis's parents last saw her in bed at 11 p.m. Friday, and they discovered her missing at about 8 a.m. Saturday, Tucson police spokeswoman Sgt. Maria Hawke said.
Police continued to search an area of Tucson around East Broadway Boulevard and Craycroft Road into the evening using street patrols, canines, detectives and a helicopter.
Friends of the family, meanwhile, fanned out to distribute fliers with a photo of Isabel, KVOA-TV in Tucson reported.
"We're really surprised or shocked that anything like this could happen to our family," the girl's uncle, Justin Mastromarino, told the television station.
Hawke said investigators were looking into all potential scenarios, including the possibility that Isabel got up and wandered out of the home she shares with her parents and two brothers or that she was kidnapped.
Investigators also were examining every door and window of the house for signs of a break-in, Hawke said.
Both parents live in the home, so police had no indication a child custody dispute was involved but weren't completely ruling it out.
"Because of the possibility existing that this child could have been abducted, we're treating it as if it's that significant," Hawke said Saturday afternoon. "We don't want to be caught behind the ball by not exploring that possibility."
The working-class neighborhood of single-family homes is sandwiched between a large shopping mall to the east and businesses and a Catholic school to the west.
Hawke says at least 75 law enforcement officers were involved, possibly as many as 100, as more resources continue to arrive to help in the search and investigate the disappearance.
Isabel is described as just under 4-feet-tall and weighing 44 pounds, with brown hair and hazel eyes.
These photos, taken from a missing persons flyer, show 15-year-old Sierra LaMar,
who was last seen early Friday leaving her Morgan Hill, Calif., home.
A day after police said a missing California girl likely had been kidnapped, searchers found possible items of interest in the case, including condoms and an empty box labeled "handcuffs" not far from where she was last seen.
Santa Clara sheriff deputies confirmed Thursday that a volunteer searching for missing 15-year-old Sierra LaMar of Morgan Hill, Calif., discovered the items near a dead-end road about two miles from the girl's home, Fox affiliate KTVU-TV reported.
The potential evidence, part of a series of items discovered by volunteers, will be sent to the county crime lab for testing, authorities said.
"Volunteer search members located an empty box that was labeled 'stainless-steel handcuffs' and five feet away a couple of used condoms," Santa Clara County Sheriff's Department spokesman Jose Cardoza told the station.
But Cardoza noted that the items were found in an area known to authorities as a place where underage people go to drink alcohol and party.
Investigators said this week that they think LaMar, a sophomore at Sobrato High School, likely was the victim of an acquaintance abduction.
She last was seen March 16 leaving her home at around 7:15 a.m. to walk to a school bus stop. Police dogs searching for the girl lost her scent on the driveway of her home.
The teenager usually walked from her home to a nearby bus stop, but a bus driver said he saw no sign of her.
LaMar's phone was recovered shortly after her disappearance about three-quarters of a mile from her home after police tracked its electronic ping. Police said the last text LaMar sent out was shortly before 7 a.m. the day she disappeared, and it was not a distress text. He also said there was no forensic evidence on the phone.
The girl's bag also was discovered a couple of miles from her home. Her pants and shirt were found neatly folded inside the Juicy brand bag, though it's not known whether those are the clothes she was last seen wearing, police said.
There is currently no person of interest in the case, and police are still treating it as a missing person case.
Police said they have interviewed registered sex offenders in the area near where LaMar was last seen. There are 276 registered sex offenders in the area, according to the station.
Sierra lives with her mother and stepfather. She transferred to the school in October after the family moved from Fremont to Morgan Hill. She is described as having a very good relationship with her family.
The girl's father, Steve LaMar, who lives some 40 miles away in Fremont, is a registered sex crimes offender but is not considered a suspect in the case.
Sierra LaMar is described as 5 feet 2 inches, with brown hair. She was last seen carrying a Juicy brand pink and black purse.
Anyone with information on the teenager's whereabouts is being urged to call the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Department at 408-299-2311.
This photo, provided by family members,
shows 22-year-old Ian Burnet, right.
The father of a missing Virginia college student is asking for the public's help in finding his son, who disappeared almost two weeks ago while on a trip to New York City.
Ian Burnet, a 22-year-old student on full scholarship at Virginia Commonwealth University, was last heard from on Dec. 30 while touring Manhattan.
"This is not something we'd expect from Ian, to just drop off the map," his father, Mark Burnet, told FoxNews.com by phone from his home in Richmond, Va. "We’re mystified."
Burnet said he last heard from his son when he received a text message from him on Dec. 28. His son left by bus for New York City on Dec. 26 and was staying with friends in a subletted apartment on 139th St. and Riverside Drive.
He said his son also sent a text message to his female college roommate on Dec. 30 at around 4 p.m., mentioning sites he had visited in the city -- including Central Park -- and discussing plans upon his return to school. That was the last known communication from Ian, his father said.
There has been no activity on Burnet's credit card or bank accounts since his disappearance, according to his father. His cellphone was left at the apartment -- which his father noted was typical of Ian, an Eagle Scout, who he said enjoys running and walking through parks.
Burnet also said his son, an engineering student who was valedictorian of his high school class, had no history of drug or alcohol abuse.
Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne said Wednesday that the New York City Police Department is working with authorities in Virginia to locate Burnet.
"Friends said he stayed with them in an apartment on 139th St in Manhattan where they said they last saw him Dec 30, and where he left behind his personal belongings, including his cell phone," Browne said in an email.
Burnet's father said hundreds of volunteers from New York and New Jersey have so far assisted in the search, distributing fliers with his son's photograph. The young man's family has established a website, www.FindIanBurnet.com, devoted to the search for him. A Facebook page for him has also been created with more than 1,700 members.
Ian Burnet is described as 5-foot-8 and weighing 131 pounds. He has green eyes and curly dark brown hair. Anyone with information on his disappearance is being urged to call the New York City Police Department at 212-690-8811.
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