Missing adults slipping through funding cracks

Published Wednesday, March 28, 2007

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) - When Janice Smolinski’s 31-year-old son, Billy, disappeared in 2004, there were no Amber Alerts, no urgent police investigations.

Police made the family wait three days to report the Waterbury man’s disappearance because a neighbor believed he left town voluntarily. The family organized its own search parties and pressured police to fingerprint Billy’s truck, his mother said.

Two-and-a-half years later, Billy Smolinski is nowhere to be found, and his mother has joined a national push for more consistent laws for handling missing-adult cases. The group’s Campaign for the Missing is lobbying this year in Connecticut, New Jersey, Florida, Oregon, New York, Missouri, Ohio and Indiana.

"Our system isn’t working," Janice Smolinski said. "Unfortunately, when adults go missing, they don’t really take it seriously."

Just a little less than half of the more than 109,000 active records in the National Crime Information Center’s missing person file as of Dec. 31, 2005, involved adults.

The National Center for Missing Adults, a government-supported organization that handled more than 23,000 reports and helped nearly 25,000 family members in 2005, had its federal funding cut last year to $148,000.

In October, the organization warned it might close its doors if it did not get more funding; it did not return repeated calls recently, and it was not clear whether it was still in operation.

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, in comparison, typically receives more than $35 million a year from the federal government.

Police say they do not have the resources to focus attention on every case, particularly because there is nothing in the law to prevent an adult from walking away from his friends and family.

"We cannot do for everybody that they would like us to do," said West Hartford Police Chief James Strillacci, legislative chairman for the Connecticut Police Chiefs Association. "We can only do what the law and our budgets allow."

Contrary to TV crime shows, he said, the FBI rarely assists in missing adult cases.

Family members said they believe local police need better training and more resources to track down missing adults. The laws proposed by Campaign for the Missing would require police to accept most missing-persons reports and to collect certain information, such as blood type and eye color. The families also want to require police to enter all collected information, including DNA, into federal databases and to provide updates. They also want to ban the cremation of unidentified remains.

Kelly Jolkowski helped create the Campaign for the Missing after her 19-year-old son, Jason, vanished in 2001 from the family’s Omaha, Neb., driveway.

"The only thing you can do is get the story out there," she said. "One of these days you’re going to hit the right person."

Jolkowski said she has heard horror stories from families whose local police departments did not know of the federal DNA database. She has also learned of unidentified bodies cremated or buried in unmarked graves without any DNA taken.

In Indianapolis, family members said it took six weeks for a formal police investigation into the disappearance of Molly Dattilo, who disappeared in 2004.

"They could have tracked down more people in the very beginning with a fresh memory," said Dattilo’s cousin, Keri Dattilo. "I think they need to start taking these cases seriously in the beginning. They need to listen to the families."

Dattilo has not been found.