Black & Missing: Does America Care?

This particular subject kind of hits home for me. My cousin has been missing for 7 years, and the Police have put little or no effort into trying to find her. Her and I had not spoken in quite some time but I can't help but feel sad when I think about the possibility of never having the opportunity to speak to her again. Although I have no idea where she is, I am 100 percent certain that people don't just fall off of the face of the earth. Somebody knows something. Somebody always knows something!

A staggering 30 percent of persons missing in the United States in 2012 were people of color. Although our government acknowledges these disappearances in pages of data, legal officials and national media outlets can barely cite a case by name. Herein lies the problem.

Americans are oblivious. They have no desire to learn about the dozens of black faces that vanish nationally every day. Elizabeth Smart and Natalee Holloway become the subjects of a national news media frenzy, while other stories fall by the wayside.

 Police in Washington D.C. say there are 30 unsolved cases involving missing people of color in the city.

This is one such case.

On the morning of Sept. 15, 1999, Sabrina Logan got a frantic call from her daughter, Stephanie Logan. Sabrina’s sister, Allean Logan, wasn’t answering her phone. Could Sabrina go over to Allean’s home in Southwest Washington and see if she was okay, Stephanie asked.

When Sabrina got there, she heard Allean’s infant son, Jerome, crying through the locked door. Worried, Sabrina rushed to get an apartment manager. When the door swung open, she found Jerome sitting in his chair. Allean, 36, was nowhere to be found.

“You could tell his diaper was soaking wet, like he had it on a couple of hours,” Stephanie Logan recalled her mother telling her.

No one has seen or heard from Allean since. Nearly 14 years later, there are still more questions than answers. Allean’s family says she never would have left Jerome alone. They say she would have taken personal items such as Jerome’s stroller, her cigarettes, her keys and her shoes if she planned to leave and never return.

“Sometimes, it gets kind of depressing,” Stephanie, 41, said. “We just miss having Allean around. She had a real uplifting spirit.”

PR