international

MP of the week: Jose Francisco Fuentes Pereira

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This week’s featured missing person is seven-year-old Jose Francisco Fuentes Pereira, who disappeared from the San Ysidro, California area on December 7, 1993.

Jose grew up in a remote village in El Salvador and at the time of his disappearance he was traveling with a large group, including four family members, and had crossed into the United States where Jose planned to reunite with his mother whom he hadn’t seen since he was a toddler. Just after they got past the border fence, someone yelled “policia” and everyone scattered. They eventually regrouped, but Jose never turned up.

He had never been to school, and according to his relatives he did not know his last name or date of birth, and as everyone called him Paquito he may not have even known his first name. So if he is still alive and didn’t perish in the desert like many migrants do, he may have no idea who he really is.

Jose would be 39 years old today.

Using artificial intelligence to find missing persons by tattoos

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Yesterday I read this interesting article about the use of AI to find missing persons in Mexico. (There are soooo many missing persons in Mexico. Cause of cartels, etc.) The AI scans dead bodies and identifies their tattoos, saving humans the trouble. And then tattoos can be matched to missing persons.

I admit to being extremely skeptical of the benefits of AI generally (it certainly isn’t the cure-all that tech companies make it out to be) but this sounds like it could be a good use for it.

Only, however, if the missing person’s tattoos are recorded accurately. And I know they often are not.

There’s one guy I put up recently, whom CDOJ says has a tattoo of “Susan” on his chest. Well, his Charley Project page has a photo of his bare chest taken from Facebook, and the tattoo says “Susie” not “Susan”. An easy mistake to make, but one which could keep him from being identified. I recall another case where I had two different, conflicting text descriptions of a missing guy’s tattoo, and when I tracked down a photo of the tattoo in question, it turned out both of the descriptions were wrong. If the tattoo is not on your own body, and particularly if it’s in a place most people don’t see often cause it’s covered by clothing, the particulars of the image might not be recalled correctly.

Wanted to recommend this article

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I thought I’d share this article: Online sleuths and fake news: The world of missing people and the torture their families have to endure. The sub-headline is “The disappearance of Jay Slater in Tenerife took the febrile world of online sleuthing and tragedy trolling to new levels. His grieving relatives are among a growing number of families facing online attacks and struggling to tackle callous misinformation.” It’s about British missing person cases, but the same sort of “tragedy trolling” occurs in American missing person cases.

I had written about this myself before, in 2021, in the aftermath of Gabby Pettito’s murder. I think it’s gotten even worse since then because of AI spitting out its own content.

As the article says, some online sleuths (particularly the ones who like to insert themselves into the story) can be dangerous and hamper actual police investigations.

Some interesting missing persons articles I saw today

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In the city of Świętochłowice in southern Poland, 27 years ago, a couple’s 15-year-old adopted daughter, Mirella, dropped out of sight. Her parents said she’d run away back to her biological parents. They were lying. Mirella has resurfaced and has quite a tale to tell. She was never missing. The entire time, her adoptive parents had been holding her against her will in their own home!

Per this People Magazine article which has links to a bunch of Polish language articles about the case, Mirella was kept confined to a small room and didn’t have access to the basic things needed to maintain hygiene, such as menstrual supplies or underwear. When she was found she was emaciated and looked “like an old lady”, and she was sent to a hospital. No charges have been filed against the parents but the case is still under investigation. It reminds me of the Josef Fritzl case. Horrific.

In Santa Barbara, California, they’re searching for a nine-year-old girl who hasn’t been seen in a year but wasn’t reported missing by her family. Her name is Melodee Buzzard and a school official notified the authorities of her “prolonged absence”. When the police went to check on Melodee’s welfare at her home, she wasn’t there and her mom had “no clear explanation” as to what happened. I really hope she’s still alive but it sounds like she probably is not and that her parent or parents did something to her.

Five months ago, Petros Krommindas disappeared from a beach in New York, leaving a towel and other stuff behind on the beach. He was training for a triathalon and his family thinks he went for a swim to practice and got in trouble. Krommindas was running for an elected position as a Democrat in Nassau County, New York at the time of his disappearance, and although he is presumed dead, his name has not been removed from the ballot. The local Democratic Party tried to have him removed in September, but two voters filed a lawsuit to stop them, and a local judge sided with the voters, saying that because Krommindas has not been declared legally dead (and can’t be, not for at least three years after his disappearance), the law requires his candidacy to continue. In response, the local Democratic Party is campaigning for Krommindas’s election. His family has also urged voters to elect him.

The article mentions a previous case where missing person Nicholas Begich (also a Democrat, incidentally) was elected to Congress two weeks after he disappeared from Alaska and was presumed dead. Later that year he was declared legally dead and another election was held. Begich was never found. I just updated his casefile to add the “Jr.” appelation to his name, which is mentioned in the article about Krommidas.

I did want to address a famous case on the other side of the world which resolved recently

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I felt I should acknowledge the Phillips children’s disappearance, even though it happened in New Zealand. The violent crime rate is pretty low in New Zealand and this case is quite sad.

A man abducted his three children and they melted into the New Zealand countryside, believed to be living out there in the wilderness. For almost four years (this happened in December 2021). They were found finally, but only after a confrontation with the police in which the abductor, Tom Phillips, was shot dead and a police officer injured. One of the children he had kidnapped was with him at the time. Two other children were found at a campsite in the remote forest hours, later.

The children would be now about 9, 10 and 11 years old and they’re going to need a lot of help to recover from this, both mental and medical help; it wouldn’t be surprising to me if they’d gotten parasites or something in the forest and they might be malnourished. Plus the trauma of what their father did, and his violent loss.

Nobody wins in a case like this. But I am glad the children are alive.

I wanted to share some articles about missing persons in Syria

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Article one, from the New York Times: They Were Treated Like Orphans. But They Knew the Truth. When the Syrian regime fell in December, its secrets began to emerge from the rubble. One of its darkest secrets: the forced disappearance of hundreds of children.

Article two, from the Washington post: Inside the 13-year search for Austin Tice, the journalist who disappeared.

Both are gift links; there should be no paywall.

I highly doubt that Austin Tice is alive, particularly since the Assad regime has fallen and Syria’s prisons have been emptied and he still hasn’t resurfaced. But I’m sure there are many kids alive in Syria whose relatives are searching for them.

Including, perhaps, Zahra Shikder and Yusuf Shikder. They are from Florida. In 2015, while their dad was on a pilgrimage to Mecca, their mother took off with them and joined the ISIS proto-state in Syria. Per this New York Times article from 2019 (also a gift link, no paywall), the children’s mother was killed in the war zone and the children were taken in by other members of the Islamic State and were supposedly in Baghuz, the Syrian town which was the last ISIS stronghold, when it fell. If they survived the fall of Baghuz they may in detention camps now with other ISIS-supporting women and kids. Something like 40,000 or so people live in those camps, almost all of them women and children; the men were sent to prison.

I’ve never added the Shikder children to the Charley Project because it wouldn’t really accomplish anything; they aren’t here in the US and I don’t think Syrian or Iraqi people are going over my site looking for missing kids who could possibly be in their countries.

MP of the week: Jesus De Galindez

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This week’s featured missing person case is a historical one. Jesus Maria De Galindez will have been missing for seventy years next year. He was forty when he disappeared from Manhattan in 1956, and in the extremely unlikely event he’s still alive he’d be 109 years old today.

Galindez’s disappearance was a state-sponsored one (one of two on Charley) but it wasn’t sponsored by OUR state. Rather, agents from the Dominican Republic abducted him from Manhattan and disappeared him. This kind of thing still happens once in awhile in countries around the world. Unlike the lady at the previous link, but like Jamal Khashoggi, Galindez is presumed to have been assassinated and his body was never found.

I think it’s extremely unlikely that he will ever be located. Certainly not within the U.S.; his remains, if there are any left, are in the Dominican Republic. I view the Charley Project as functioning as kind of a memorial website when it comes to historical cases like this.

Let’s talk about the Islamic State again

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In August I wrote a blog entry talking about what I had learned reading up this past year on ISIS, which I found missing person relevant since many of their foreign recruits vanished from happy lives abroad leaving grieving families wondering what happened. Well, I am still reading about ISIS and found a horrifying missing person relevant story I wanted to share.

So I am reading another book about ISIS, this one by an American journalist who lived in Cairo for several years, speaks several languages fluently and interviewed loads of jihadists and ISIS people. (Not every jihadist was in ISIS. In fact there is a lot of infighting among the various terror organizations. Al Qaeda hates ISIS for example.)

Salafism is the ultra-conservative type of Islam practiced in the Islamic State, and also in Saudi Arabia, and also by a small percentage of Muslims worldwide. Most Salafists are NOT terrorists (they tend to be focused on their religion rather than the world outside it), but while researching his book the American spent a lot of time at a Salafi mosque in Cairo which also happened to be an active recruiting center for jihadists. He noticed a lot of foreign Muslims there as well as Egyptians. The guys at the mosque attempted to convert him to Islam and that was fine with him because he was interested in learning about their theology, but he didn’t bite.

Anyway, while doing research for his book, this American encountered a Japanese woman and was surprised to see her alone with another man (Hesham, the guy that referred him to the mosque) since Salafi women don’t spend time alone with unrelated men. The American also noticed the Japanese lady seemed terrified of Hesham. Both the American and this woman happened to be able to speak Russian, and Hesham could not, so she was able to explain to him what was going on without Hesham’s knowing what she was saying and to ask for help.

She explained she had been in Japan and had had a personal crisis in her life with poverty and loneliness. She met these two Egyptian dudes online and they befriended her. They were the only friends she had at the time. They convinced her to travel to Egypt to visit them. Upon her arrival they further convinced her to convert to Islam. Then they basically locked her up and held her against her will, watched constantly, and she was very frightened of them. By the time she met the American it had been several days of her being confined. They were also threatening to take her phone and computer away, she said, and she did not know what to do. She had no money and knew nobody in this foreign land; she was in a lot of trouble.

It sometimes happens that women are enticed to travel to another country on the promise of a respectable well paying job, only to be sex trafficked on arrival. That’s basically what happened here except the woman was lured with the promise of friendship rather than a job. And the American reporter she asked for help from did help her escape from the jihadists at that mosque, and he believes that if he had not done so, she would have been married off to a jihadist and eventually would have been sent to Syria. Because that’s where many of the people at this mosque ended up, in ISIS territory. And then dead.

(Not Hesham though, who mumbled some lame excuse about being too old to travel to Syria and become a martyr. Hypocrite.)

After escaping the jihadists, the lady had to go into hiding. She knew nothing of jihad, she was just a random Japanese woman who was very lonely and trusted the wrong people, but she was aware she’d been sucked into something really bad and was absolutely terrified of what she called “The Organization.” And they called her repeatedly, even after she got a new phone number, harassing her and demanding she come back to them.

If this lady had not happened to encounter a sympathetic American with a common language that the people at the mosque couldn’t understand, by now she’d probably be either dead or branded a terrorist and confined in either a refugee camp in Syria or a prison in Japan. I do not know if ISIS had Japanese members who survived, and how Japan chose to deal with them. Some countries repatriate and imprison their citizens that joined ISIS and some have let them languish in the Syrian refugee camps to this day.

The American wrote his book which I am reading now. He said the fact that the Japanese woman chose to remain in Cairo after leaving the mosque indicated she was “incorrigible” and “immune to help.” He almost seemed to regret rescuing her. But this book came out in 2016, before the cataclysmic fall of the ISIS caliphate. I’m sure, knowing what he does now, the reporter is very glad he helped that lady escape the mosque.

I am not surprised jihadist recruiters did this sort of thing, luring foreign non-Muslims as well as foreign Muslims. I had not previously seen a story like this one though. I wonder how many other women wound up in that situation.

Thomas Spence and John Rodgers missing for 50 years yesterday

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The BBC has done an article appealing for information on the ice-cold case of 11-year-old Thomas Spence and 13-year-old John Rodgers, who disappeared together while waiting for the school bus in Belfast, Northern Ireland on November 26, 1974. I think the quote from the police saying their disappearances are “unexplained and potentially suspicious” is kind of funny. Of COURSE the disappearance of two children without a trace for FIFTY YEARS is going to be considered suspicious. I highly doubt these boys ran away and just decided never to contact home again.

In 2001 someone was arrested on suspicion of murder, and two houses were searched, but nothing was found and the suspect (who was not publicly named, per British privacy regulations) was released. He was 69 at the time so he may be dead now. If still alive he’d be in his nineties.

The article also mentions that the boys’ case was featured in a documentary (I can’t find it streaming anywhere but the trailer is here) and suggests the boys’ case was linked with a pedophile network that also found victims in the Kincora Boys’ Home.

Who knows what happened. At this point, unless their bodies are found, I think it’s unlikely that we will find out.