The Last Place You'd Look

by Carole Moore

  “He had two very distinct sides to him: One was very conscientious, and the other was sociopathic with no conscience. One was very impulsive; the other was restrained and restricted and full of guilt, shame, and denial,” Barton says. “One side of him was highly devoted, the other deceitful. One side was passive, the other [full of] rage.”

  Barton says many who make big commitments without enough forethought end up feeling trapped. She cites Jennifer Wilbanks, the runaway bride from Georgia, who was profiled earlier in this chapter.

  “People who are trying to meet other people’s expectations and demands on them feel more and more like they’re being buried alive, and they don’t know how to get out of it,” Barton says.

  But, Barton adds, there is also sometimes a failure to attach emotionally and connect to the other people in their lives. As a result, these individuals often find it easier to walk out and leave behind obligations and commitments. They form no real bond with others and opt to cut already tenuous ties with their previous lives, Barton says.

  Narcissists also sometimes walk away from their lives because they view others merely in relation to themselves and the others’ ability to provide the narcissists with the things they need. “So the other person doesn’t have rights and feelings as far as the narcissist is concerned,” she says.

  Disappointment—either in the other person or directed at the narcissist—can ignite flight. Once this happens, the other person ceases to exist as far as the narcissist is concerned, and it’s not difficult to walk away. When most people leave, says Barton, they generally either have an underlying mental disorder or are leaving behind something they perceive as threatening.

  “I think a lot of people who run away have a tendency to think in terms of, ‘You can’t fire me because I quit,’” says Barton. She categorizes them as the types of individuals who change jobs on a frequent basis and are impulsive. “They’re always leaving relationships, jobs, homes, always thinking, ‘There will be something better for me there.’”

  She says it’s called the geographic cure—what Ahearn referred to as “the grass is greener”—and adults are not the only ones who seek it; juveniles often also look for something better than what they have. But when a child leaves home, they’re not seeking greener pastures, just different ones. Barton says no matter why a child runs, for parents, the idea of not knowing where he is can be “almost worse than knowing he’s dead.”

  R

  Kelly Hawkins knows what Barton means. Hawkins has been through the wringer with her foster daughter so often that she feels flattened. A therapeutic foster parent trained to deal with high-risk kids, Hawkins’s foster daughter, Maggie (not her real name), takes off with the same casualness that other teenage girls employ when they change clothes. Hawkins says Maggie is both promiscuous and a habitual drug user. She also has assaulted her foster mother.

  “[Maggie] went into foster care when she was five. Her mother was a meth addict, and they actually busted a meth lab in the basement of her house,” Hawkins says. Authorities removed two infants who tested positive for drugs at birth from the home but left behind the older children, including Maggie.

  “That was the big number-one failure there,” says Hawkins.

  Maggie eventually ended up joining the others in foster care, where the siblings were broken apart for adoptive purposes. The children were placed into pre-adoptive homes: Maggie’s was with Kelly. Hawkins herself has not formally adopted Maggie because if she does, she will lose access to many crucial services, including intensive mental health treatment, but she did petition for guardianship of Maggie and received the appointment.

  Maggie spent some time in a respite home. Since most foster care programs do not allow kids to stay in unlicensed homes, some states provide respite care in the form of homes that take foster kids on a temporary basis. It gives both the foster parents and the children a chance to experience time away from one another. Hawkins says Maggie began hanging around with the wrong kids and doing drugs.

  “The first two times she ran away at age thirteen, she was only gone overnight,” Hawkins says. But then Maggie upped the ante: she disappeared for two weeks.

  “No one cared or even comforted me. I was beside myself doing the things other parents of missing kids do, and no one even asked how I was or if they could help. When I confronted one close friend about it, her response was, ‘It’s not like you didn’t know something like this might happen.’ Another said, ‘It’s her own fault,’ as if that made me feel better,” Hawkins says.

  The entire missing persons reporting system is stacked against the parents of runaways. Most police agencies have few resources to dedicate to finding kids who have left home. Once they turn sixteen, many states consider them adults and won’t look for them without a strong indication of foul play. If a child who is old enough to be on his own is found, often the department has no legal right to tell the parent where the child is or give any details other than to ask the child to contact the parent. It’s even worse when the runaway has crossed jurisdictions.

  Police will do courtesy checks for officers in other jurisdictions—that is, if an officer has a lead on a child’s whereabouts in another city, that jurisdiction will send an officer to try and locate the child. But unless there is something more to the case that’s as much as the other jurisdiction is going to do. Runaways form a huge national problem. Many times they turn into homeless street kids or support themselves by becoming involved in drugs, prostitution, and other crimes. The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention concurs with the National Runaway Switchboard’s (NRS) lower-end estimate that about 1.6 million American kids run away from their homes each year, but of that number, the Center for Problem-Oriented Policing (POP) says about a third are technically missing. Of the remaining two-thirds, either the parents know where the kids are or the child is a “throwaway”—a kid whose parents or guardians don’t want him or her in the home. Other sources lean toward the high end of the NRS’s estimate—2.8 million—and believe the number of runaways is much higher than official statistics indicate, since some parents and guardians avoid police involvement and don’t report the child as missing. Although law enforcement officially works with parents to locate these kids, many agencies find themselves constrained by a lack of money and manpower from doing much follow-up.

  Even though Hawkins’s daughter was a child who had no business on the streets, she discovered her foster-parent status made her even less likely than other parents to engender support from criminal justice agencies or other authorities. On the runaway ladder, foster parents occupy the bottom rung.

  “There are no supports, no help for parents like me. There is no Amber Alert, no donations to pay for posters and ads, no all-night vigils, no articles. No one gets worried about a foster kid who runs away, no one thinks I should care, no one wants to hear what I’m doing to find her, [and] no one thinks I should even let her back into my life. My friends and family mean well when they say they are worried for my safety and that I should turn my back on her, but this is my daughter,” Hawkins says.

  According to a report authored by Kelly Dedel (a criminal justice consultant with a doctorate in clinical psychology) for the nonprofit POP, which works with criminal justice agencies to find solutions to issues confronting police agencies, “Juveniles in substitute care (e.g., foster care, group homes) are more likely to run away than juveniles who live at home with a parent or guardian. The chances of juveniles in care running away are highest in the first few months after placement, and older juveniles are more likely to run away than younger juveniles. Juveniles who run away from substitute care are more likely to run away repeatedly than juveniles who run away from home. Although they are only a small proportion of the total number of runaways, those who run away from care also tend to stay away longer and travel farther away than those who run away from home.”

  Overwhelmed and underfunded police agencies tend to see foster kids a lot—many times as tr
oublemakers and runaways. Most are not as lucky as Hawkins’s daughter Maggie; without anyone to advocate or search for them, they often slip into a statistical dead zone.

  Maggie, who is seventeen as of this writing, has spent time in jail and is predisposed to return there in the future, if she doesn’t meet a more sinister end on the streets—a potential that Hawkins realizes and fears.

  “She is my child and I love her, but the constant emotional turmoil brought on by wondering where she is and what she’s doing is wearing me out,” Hawkins admits.

  Hawkins knows her situation with Maggie is not the norm. Although many kids who run away have substance abuse issues or harbor mental illnesses, others who take to the streets see it as an escape hatch from difficult situations. Dr. Peter Ferber, a Massachusetts-based child psychiatrist, says he believes that children who are mentally whole do not abandon relationships with parents in a family that is healthy and has good relationships. Sure, the occasional rebellious moment or blowup may produce a momentary fracture, and the child might threaten to leave or go to a friend’s house for a day or two. But in the long run, the kids who end up on the streets with no intention of ever coming home are, in Ferber’s opinion, the products of homes with severe issues.

  Broken homes, sexual abuse, parental substance use, and violence—all contribute to the growing problem of runaways in this country, according to Ferber. “In many cases, there is a selfish, self-centered parent who is unable to see the kids as separate sentient humans with a separate viewpoint and a separate set of needs.”

  At other times, outside pressures can cause a child to make a poor decision.

  “I’ve seen any number of kids just before or just after college entrance who seem to have been functioning well until that point. They are away for a couple of months and find themselves unable to study or make friends and can’t tolerate the separation from their home or parents,” says Ferber.

  Ferber adds that a lot of runaways leave when they are angry or when they are restrained from activities their parents see as harmful. He, like Barton, points to specific pathologies as leading indicators of children who might be more inclined to run away from home.

  Children who have attention deficit disorder are impulsive, as are children with bipolar disorder and conduct disorders. “Unrecognized learning disorders can lead kids to fight with their parents and run away,” says Ferber, who adds that “impulsive kids are much more likely to become involved with drug cultures.”

  Living on the streets isn’t glamorous or exciting, but many kids who end up there get caught up in the drugs or fall into the hands of those who exploit children. When the economy is in a downturn, experts say, the number of runaways increases, which is unfortunate because a down economy often translates to less money allocated for youth services that deal with runaways.

  The NRS, which fields calls from kids who have left home or are considering leaving home, says that among their crisis callers, increasing numbers are turning to panhandling, the sex industry, and selling drugs. In 2008, they reported that the majority of their crisis callers were ages fifteen to seventeen, and, as Ferber affirms, the most commonly reported crisis involved family issues and abuse.

  Youth shelters, youth crises centers, and other private and public initiatives to return runaways to their homes have been established in every state and major city in the nation. And cities are where most of the kids end up—not in crisis centers, but on the streets of New York or Los Angeles, Miami or Minneapolis, Dallas or Seattle. Runaway hotlines offer kids a chance to contact their parents or talk to an adult who can give them advice or the opportunity to connect with a sympathetic ear. Greyhound Lines offers a free bus ticket home to runaways, and there are other organizations that help reunite kids with their families, but the truth is that the runaway has to want to come home for any of this to work.

  For parents looking for their runaways, the best advice is to grab a page from Ahearn’s book and take what they know about their kids and use it to map their most probable paths. Where do they have ties or where have they expressed a desire to visit? What are their habits, likes and dislikes, passions and needs? Looking for them the way Ahearn traces a skip—the precept of thinking like the enemy in order to defeat him—might elicit success.

  As for the children nobody’s looking for, the throwaways, the unreported missing and foster kids who aren’t lucky enough to have someone like Kelly Hawkins in their corners, the future holds little but a short life on the streets and the eventual victimization that comes with that lifestyle.

  R

  “I wish I could just run away.” It’s a sentiment almost everyone has experienced. Even the most privileged of the privileged, Princess Grace of Monaco, once expressed wistful envy of the lifestyle of those with no ties to responsibility. For adults crushed under the weight of modern demands, the idea of a life that starts at ground zero, ready to be reconstituted in a fresh new form, has merit. But few make the move, and of the ones who do, their families are often left to search and wonder what happened.

  For the teens that take off, the reality of living outside the family unit is often tragic. Many panhandle, commit petty crimes, or sell their bodies in order to stay alive. Kids who get caught up in drug and alcohol abuse or turn to prostitution begin a downhill slide—crime and homelessness send many to the morgue, used up at much too early an age.

  With the exception of those who flee abusive situations, adults who walk away from it all leave behind pockets of victims: parents, spouses, children, and the others who love them. When a kid runs away, he or she also often becomes a victim. Either way, those who disappear on purpose add to this country’s expanding missing persons population.

  • 6 •

  Parental Abduction:

  Stories of the Parents Left Behind

  Children who are victims of family abduction are uprooted from their homes and deprived of their other parent. Often they are told the other parent no longer loves them or is dead. Too often abducted children live a life of deception, sometimes under a false name, moving frequently and lacking the stability needed for healthy, emotional development.—Family Abduction Prevention

  To the best of Stephen Watkins’s knowledge, his former wife, Edyta Ustaszewski, is in Poland with their two sons, Christopher and Alexander. Stephen has not seen the boys since March 2009. He discovered they were missing when they did not show up for school. Their disappearance, however, did not come as a surprise.

  “The threat [of abduction] was there initially; there were a lot of little clues,” says Stephen, who lives outside of Toronto.

  Stephen did not sit and wait for the boys to vanish. Because he had anticipated their possible abduction, he worked to minimize the damage, documenting details about the boys’ mother, trying to anticipate when she might make her move. He says Edyta, born in Poland, holds joint Canadian-Polish citizenship and, in addition to the main languages of both countries, also speaks French and German. Prior to allegedly taking the boys, Stephen says Edyta enrolled them in a Polish school where they learned the language. She also enrolled them in the Boy Scouts—the Polish Boy Scouts. When Stephen and the courts asked her for the boys’ passports, he says she claimed she did not have them.

  There were other indicators that Edyta was planning to run with the children, says Stephen. She threw him off-balance by leveling criminal allegations at him, each of which, he says, were investigated by police and the Children’s Aid Society and unsubstantiated.

  From left, Christopher and Alexander Watkins. Courtesy of Stephen Watkins.

  “Every single type of allegation was [brought] against me. They were so far-fetched,” Stephen says.

  Stephen, who had sole, court-ordered custody of the boys, says his attorneys warned him that his ex-wife might do such a thing. Now he worries about what she might be telling his children about him.

  “I just want my kids found,” he says.

  The regional agency that is handling the Watkins boys’
kidnapping is conducting an ongoing investigation into the abduction. They have gathered banking, credit card, and flight data in connection with the case, but Stephen says he knows little about the information they’ve gathered because they refuse to share it with him or his attorneys. Police tell him that releasing it could impede both their investigation and eventual prosecution.

  “I feel there is more emphasis in making sure you have a very solid court case than in trying to find the kids,” Stephen says.

  According to Stephen, no one knew where Edyta was living prior to her disappearance. She paid no child support and, Stephen claims, she was “playing games” with both him and the court. Stephen last saw his children on March 6, 2009, when they went to spend the weekend with their mother. Edyta’s elderly father, who is Polish but lives in Canada, picked up the boys. Stephen discovered something was wrong at 9:30 a.m. the following Monday when the children’s school called to say they were absent.

  Stephen called Edyta but received no answer. He then contacted his attorney and the police, and the search was under way.

  Stephen and the authorities theorize that Edyta’s father drove them over the Canadian border into Rochester, New York, where they boarded a plane to Germany. His father-in-law was charged criminally in connection with their kidnapping. Thus far none of the leads generated by Stephen’s contacts there have produced any solid evidence as to their whereabouts.

  Stephen is both angry and confounded that Edyta and the boys could have escaped by crossing the border and boarding a plane out of the country, especially because Edyta’s Canadian passport had been revoked by the Canadian government. She should not have been legally able to fly. Stephen also had court orders preventing the boys from using their passports, but none of that mattered once the airplane in which they were passengers took off.