The nights are the toughest for me.
Last night we received a phone call at 2:30 AM from an anonymous caller, that claims he saw our son in Southern California, Venice to be exact. It fit some other information that we received. It is these little tidbits, when you have a runaway that you hang on to. It is the only connection that you have to the whereabouts of your teen. The call seems to be legitimate, we have his phone number and email address and we talked to him again today.
What does this do for us? I am no longer looking in our neighborhood for him, a little out of site out of mind. It is awful to be looking in every corner everywhere you go. It is nice not to have that on my mind. I also don’t feel like he will walk through the door any minute. Now we are focused on searching in Southern California. The pictures that I saw on the internet of Venice Beach look pretty nice. So at least he has some class, if he wants to be homeless.
Note, we also went to the Haight Ashbury last night and walked through the streets and into the park. Now that is a depressing scene. The homelessness, drugs, street people. In some ways I am glad he is not there, even though it is closer to home.
I am also realizing how premeditated this whole thing was, he planned this from the minute he arrived in CA. So I don’t think he put all this effort in to running to come back home. Unless (keep our fingers crossed) life gets really tough.
We called the police station in Venice, California which is part of the LAPD and sent them flyers with pictures. That is one thing the police departments do not have is pictures. How can you find someone without a picture? The neighboring town, Santa Monica, has its own police department. They have been contacted and we also sent flyers. This is the hard part, the police stations really don’t talk to each other even though they are neighboring towns. This is very common throughout California. Since we are in Northern California and the police officer up here is handling the case anything we do needs to go through him or that case number. There is a database of missing persons for the state and he is now in that database.
Next is contacting all the national missing person agencies. Each one has a little different way of working. They are:
- National Center for Missing & Exploited Kids
- National Run Away Switchboard
- California State Clearing House
- Polly Klaas Foundation
These agencies are listed on my runaway resource page now that I am a veteran at this I will add more information to the page as I get it.
Thank-you to those that have reached out. It has been our conversations that have given me the strength to keep on keeping on. Smile through the day and know that it will be all right.
I have to remember this is my sons journey and hopefully the tools he has learned from treatment will help to guide him. They say it is a step forward and (I am not sure) how many steps back. I also know he is running because he does not want to go back to the RTC. What will we do if or when we find him? That is another blog post.
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Runaway or Missing Teen Boy, My son was last seen at venice at a rave last week 3/27/11 I am on my own searching for my son I go to the beach almonst everyday using alot of gas. For a whole week I been crying to myself but I can not let my other children see me. I have even taken the kids to the beach so they can enjoy the day. but I am looking around in the mean time. I have no support groups or friends that can help. I dont even have a computer, I had to borrow one from some one, I have not yet made flyers because I dont have a recent picture of how he looks now I have one in 2009. Please help me
Thanks for the update and for sharing what you know and how you’re handling it. I can’t even begin to imagine what you’re going through. Just keeping you in my thoughts.
That was a long trip for him. I live in So Cal, so if you need me to do anything please let me know. I live an hour or so from Venice barring awful traffic.