MIssing

Etan Patz has been in the news this week.  Etan was a six year old boy living in New York City when he disappeared on the morning of May 25th, 1979.  He was never found and was declared legally dead in 2001. It was just a few days ago that a man confessed to his murder.  His disappearance sparked at first a furious effort in the NYC area which would grow into a larger movement to find missing children,  He was the first child to be pictured on a milk carton.  His became the face of the movement and in 1983, Reagan would declare May 25th as National Missing Children Day.

In the intervening years, efforts to locate missing children have continued to grow from the work of John Walsh, whose son Adam disappeared two years later, to the development of the Amber alerts which can now be received via text.  But the case of Etan Patz was the one that first created coordinated community responses to missing children.