Parents of other missing kids hope for more miracles

Parents of other missing kids hope for more

By David Crary ~ The Associated Press

For the Smart family, reunion with their daughter Elizabeth was a miracle. For countless other parents, a sad vigil continues -- yearning for news of long-vanished children like Erica Baker of Ohio or Jacob Wetterling, abducted in Minnesota in 1989.

"Never give up -- that's the message," Jacob's mother, Patty Wetterling, said Thursday. "Elizabeth is what all of us are hoping and praying for."

Jacob, 11 at the time, was abducted by a masked gunman near his home in St. Joseph, Minn. Since then, his mother has become a prominent advocate for families with missing children and heads a foundation named after her son.

Wetterling had dinner in October with the Smart family, whom she met at a White House conference on missing children. "I salute them for not giving up," she said.

There are no firm statistics on the number of families with missing children, though several hundred thousand children vanish at least briefly each year.

Most child abductions are committed by a parent or other relative as part of a custody dispute -- and sometimes children run away. In other cases, parents face the nightmare of having a child abducted by a stranger.

Erica Baker, then 9, vanished four years ago as she walked her dog in Kettering, Ohio, a suburb of Dayton. She has not been found and no one has been charged, though police have investigated more than 2,000 leads.

Erica's father was delighted to hear about Elizabeth Smart.

"I yelled 'Yahoo!' right in front of my living room when I saw it on the news," said Greg Baker. "I'm very happy for that family. Their nightmare's over, even though ours is continuing."

Baker is waiting for the last of the snow to melt so he can reassemble a search party he has led during much of his spare time since his daughter's disappearance.

"I wish Erica was back home with us," he said. "It's not our time yet."

In Missouri

In Missouri, 47 children currently are considered missing, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Some are virtual household names in the state; others, sadly, barely register.

On a Web site dedicated to 11-year-old Shawn Hornbeck, last seen riding his bike near his Richwoods home in October, the seconds tick by, the minutes pass and the days add up while a computer records how long it has been since the child vanished.

A ramshackle, wooden trailer has been turned into the Shawn Hornbeck search command center. Inside, volunteer Keith Hayes, 48, of Richwoods mans the phones.

Hayes hadn't known Shawn's family well until the child went missing, but the father of three said he felt compelled to help.

A framed picture of Shawn, in the orange baseball jersey he was last wearing, hangs on a wall, as do maps of the region, marked with areas already searched and then searched again. Photocopied pictures of dozens of other missing children are taped to the walls. Elizabeth Smart's image carries a new addition. Scrawled across it in red marker are the words: "Found 3/12/03."

"I got actual goosebumps," Hayes said of Smart's return. "Pam, she was smiling. We were all smiling. It gave us renewed hope, and the search for Shawn will continue."

New hope

In Chicago, the mother of two girls missing for 19 months said she cried on hearing of the breakthrough in the Smart case -- and also gained a new sense of hope.

"I miss my babies," Tracey Bradley said. "I have been hurting."

Her daughters, Tionda, 10, and Diamond, 3, haven't been seen since July 2001, when Tionda left a note saying they were headed to a nearby school.

When children go missing for months or years, their stories often end tragically. But there are precedents for Elizabeth Smart's homecoming, nine months after her abduction in Salt Lake City.

According to the Jacob Wetterling Foundation, a 19-year-old girl in Japan was reunited with her family in 2000, nine years after she was kidnapped. In 1979, Steven Stayner, then 14, sought help at a police station after spending seven years with an abductor who sexually abused him.

Stayner, who he died in a motorcycle accident in 1989, once wrote a message of advice regarding child abductions.

"The first thing abductors often do is convince the child that their parents don't want them," he wrote. "So don't expect abducted children to come up and ask for help."

Patty Wetterling said the Smart case might spur some long-abducted children to take the initiative in trying to escape.

"The trauma and the threats are what keeps these kids hostage," she said. "This is a message to them, that if they're put in a controlled situation and told they're not wanted by their families, they can get away and get help."