Sierra Lamar

This is the first time I will be writing a blog post focusing on an individual missing person. I have been following this case with regularity since the day this girl disappeared. There is a great deal of mystery and speculation surrounding her disappearance, which police have classified as a kidnapping, so I decided to put my own thoughts about it down here.

Sierra Lamar vanished on March 16th. She lives with her mother, Marlene Lamar, and her mother's boyfriends, Rick Gardener, in Morgan Hill, CA. Until October of 2011, Sierra lived with her father Steve Lamar in Fremont CA. It is from her mother's home that she disappeared from. According to forensic evidence recovered from Sierra's computer, she was on her Twitter account at 6:29am on the morning of the 16th of March, where she re-tweeted an update from a friend. At 7:11 she sent a text message to a friend. The content of the text message has not been made public, but law enforcement has stated that there was nothing pertinent to the investigation contained in the text message. Sometime in between her last Twitter post and her last text message, she allegedly snapped this photo of herself with her computer:

 

Sierra's mother states that she last saw her daughter on March 16th, just before she left for work at approximately 6am. Marlene Lamar works as a hand therapist in Fremont and must leave early to commute to work. Rick Gardener works in construction, it has been reported that he left before Marlene, as well as after Marlene, law enforcement has not clarified this to the media. Marlene Lamar states she left for work and the Sierra would normally leave for the bus stop at about 7:15, with the bus arriving to pick her up at about 7:25am. The bus driver reports that he never saw her that day. Her mother was unaware that her daughter missed school that entire day, not realizing that anything was wrong until her texts that afternoon were going unanswered. She drove home from work, reportedly at about 3:45, arriving in Morgan Hill at approximately 4:30. 

Having not received any responses to her text messages to Sierra, Ms. Lamar states she drove to the school to see if Sierra had possibly missed the bus. However, her daughter was not at the school, so she states she began making phone calls to Sierra's friends. At approximately 6pm Marlene Lamar received an automated e-mail notification from the school Sierra attended, informing her that her child had missed that day of classes. 

It was at this point that Marlene Lamar contacted the police in Morgan Hill to report her daughter missing. It was initially speculated that Sierra may have run away, despite having a outwardly stable home life. Sierra had been vocally unhappy on her social media sites about having moved from Fremont to Morgan Hill, and switching schools. 15 year old girls can take their unhappiness to the extreme, and have been known to run away from home when things are not going their way. However, it has been determined that Sierra did not have a history of being a runaway teen and did have a very active social life, as well as being very close to her father and older sister Danielle.

On March 17th, Sierra's Android Smartphone was found on the side of the road about a mile from her home. This fact was not released to the media for three days after the discovery, however it was the first real clue in the investigation. It has been reported by law enforcement and local media outlets that the phone showed signs of damage, as if having been thrown from a vehicle. The area where it was found, along with the entire area that Sierra lived in, was very rural and somewhat secluded. The cell phone was found in the OPPOSITE direction that Sierra would have traveled in order to make it to her bus stop that morning. The following day, Sunday March 19th,  searchers found Sierra's school books and purse, a black and pink Juicy Couture bag that she carried with her. Inside the bag were the clothes Sierra was thought to have been wearing that morning, "neatly folded" according to all reports.  This information was also not released to the public for a period of about 5 days, while police confirmed it was her bag and that the contents belonged to Sierra. The bag was found about a mile further down the same road the cell phone was discovered on. However, while the cell phone appeared to have been thrown from a vehicle, the bag and books were stashed in between an old building and a large cactus. Police used the term "secreted" when describing the location of the bag and books.

It has become difficult to ascertain at this point, but the shirt in the "last photo" above is believed to be the shirt Sierra was wearing the morning she vanished. This is not based on any witness statements however, simply on the logical deduction that since the picture was taken on the computer that morning, she most likely left the home wearing that shirt. The shirt in question is a dark blue/black San Jose Sharks sweatshirt. The shirt reported to be "neatly folded" inside the purse has been called a Sharks tee shirt, jersey and shirt, but unless Sierra had more than one shirt like this, it stands to reason that they are same shirt. It was after the discovery of the clothing in the bag that police classified her disappearance as "involuntary".

Since her purse was found, complete with her "neatly folded" garments inside, speculation in the blogging community has gone wild. Every imaginable scenario has been covered and some are compelling. But law enforcement has remained very tight lipped. They have done searches with tracking dogs and cadaver dogs, in grassy fields and bodies of water and have turned up nothing that they have reported to the media as pertinent to the case.

This case bothers me a great deal, as all missing children's cases do. Sierra's friends and family have started a Facebook page aimed at keeping awareness alive and keeping Sierra's face in everyone's minds, you can find that here: Help Find Sierra Lamar. 

There are touching statements posted here by Sierra's sister and friends. It is important that we utilize the tools at hand in these modern times, things like Facebook and Twitter can be amazing tools when it comes to spreading information. Please like their page and share it with your friends, you never know which share will be the one that matters. Thanks for reading, and let's all keep the hope alive for Sierra as well as all the other missing kids and adults in the world. 

How do we keep our kids safe?

It is a good question, but one with not many clear cut answers, mainly because there is now a seemingly infinite amount of things that kids need to be protected from. Let’s look back a few generations first; what did parents have to worry about in the past? There were clear and definite dangers to parenthood, there always are, but parents today have the whole world to contend with it seems. When my own parents were growing up it was normal for parents to have no idea where their kids were for hours at a time. Not so today, when parents are often reluctant to allow kids to ride their bikes to the park alone.

I was born in 1985, one year after the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) was established on June 13, 1984, and grew up in the time when people were just really becoming aware of the dangers posed by pedophiles. In my kindergarten, we were introduced to the “Stranger Danger” program. The eighties marked the loss of our nations innocence in the sense that we were forced to come to terms with the some of the most horrible crimes in existence. Etan Patz became a name that almost every parent in America knew. He disappeared in 1979 on his way to school and was never seen again. So many young, fresh faces on missing children posters plastered across the country have spanned the years in between. In 1981, John Walsh met heartbreak when his six year old son Adam was abducted from a shopping mall and murdered.

 Visiting the NCMEC website shows disturbing statistics, such as, an average of roughly 2,185 children are reported missing every day, making a yearly total of approximately 797,500. But what may be more disturbing to some is that only 115 of these cases were of the “traditional kidnapping standard”, which according to the NCMEC means “someone the child does not know or slight acquaintance holds the child over night or transports the child more 50 miles or more, kills the child, demands ransom, or intends to keep the child permanently”. 

Picture taken from FBI.gov

The Internet

With growth in technology over the years, the rise in danger to kids has come just as far. Aside from the obvious warnings like “Don’t talk to strangers” and “Use the buddy system” we have to watch out for predators online. More and more kids are becoming active on the internet and at younger ages too. Kindergartners often have a strong working knowledge of how to navigate on the web, but no knowledge of what NOT to respond to. It is so easy for a 7 year old to find himself in a teen chat room crawling with individuals that will try to prey on them.

By now, most of us have seen the Dateline NBC specials with Chris Hansen, To Catch a Predator. For those that haven’t, this is an eye opening piece of investigative journalism that involved extensive coordination with law enforcement agencies as well as teaming up with an online group known as Perverted Justice. The idea of the show was simple; set up a house with surveillance equipment, pose as teens in chat rooms, lure the predator to the home, rather than allowing the predator to lure a real child FROM their home. The scary part was HOW MANY TIMES they were able to net pedophiles. This show ran for three years from 2004 to 2007 and they always got the target! And that made me think about how many real kids those people actually got to! It’s enough to make any parent a little nauseous.

According to the NCMEC statistics page; “Approximately one in seven youth online (10-17yr olds) received a sexual solicitation or approach over the Internet”. Four percent of these solicitations are aggressive, meaning the child is asked to meet somewhere with the predator, the child is contacted by the predator on the phone or sent offline mail such as gifts or flowers. We need to monitor our children’s Internet activity better, not to say it must be restricted completely, but parental controls must be implemented and maintained. That is the worst part about this problem at least. It is so preventable!

Abductions

If you keep up with news reports, you will notice the trend. Kids go out to walk to a friend’s house, the park, the store, school, anywhere, and just never come back. In some cases a body is found, but in too many, as in the case of Etan Patz, there is never any trace. In some cases they even disappear from inside their own homes. Polly Klaas was having a sleepover with friends on October 1^st 1993 at her home in Petaluma CA, when Richard Allen David broke in, bound Polly’s friends and took the 12 year old away into the night. Her brutalized body was found on private property, Davis was arrested and sentenced to death, but Polly didn’t come home. She aspired to be famous, and her father Mark made sure that her wish came true after her death with the KlaasKids Foundation, which helps stop child predators and search for missing children.  

Other Kids

There are thousands upon thousands of stories like Polly Klaas and Etan Patz, stranger abductions, kidnappings of the most original standard. But what about the dangers posed by other children? This is a trend that is becoming more and more concerning. One recent case that comes to mind is that of Elizabeth Olten, a nine year old girl from Missouri who was murdered in a premeditated and cold blood fashion by 15 year old Alyssa Bustamante. Elizabeth was friends with a sibling of Alyssa’s and was heading home from their house when Alyssa followed her, lured her into the woods nearby to a previously dug grave, strangled her and cut her throat before burying her and then returning to her home. The disturbed girl confessed to the crime and lead police to where Elizabeth was buried. When cops asked her why she did she replied “I just wanted to see what it felt like to kill someone”.

Abuse and Neglect

Kids are exposed to so many things now, and many of those things can leave them mentally unstable. This has been a generation of parents abandoning their children with grandparents, aunts or uncles. It is a generation of parents who never stop partying, even when they have babies. There is a new generation of many unwanted and uncared for children growing up right now. According to ChildHelp.org, 14% of all men and 36% of all women in prison in this country were abused as children. Thirty percent of abused children will grow up to abuse their own children, and the worst numbers yet; 80% of children that die as a result of abuse are under four years of age, while over half of those deaths go unrecorded as resulting from abuse.  

Awareness/Education

Until people’s habits and behaviors change, the only way to try to keep our children safe is by using certain tools. Learn how to utilize parental controls on your computer is a good way to assure safety on the Internet. However, there are times when our kids are going to be vulnerable and outside of our protective arms. This is why we must talk to our kids, the earlier the better, about the dangers that they must help you protect them against. Make a planned meeting place if you are ever late picking them up from school, preferably ON CAMPUS so that they are in range of trusted adults. Make sure your child knows the way home, their address and phone number, and an emergency contact. If your child is trustworthy, invest in a cell phone for emergencies. Go to your local police department and request a Child Safety ID Kit. These are free and an invaluable tool to law enforcement in the event that your child ever DOES go missing.

Education and awareness is the only way to begin the battle against the vast dangers lurking in the shadows, waiting for us to turn our backs for just a minute.

References

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children - Statistics - http://www.missingkids.com/en_US/documents/Statistics.pdf

ChildHelp. - National Child Abuse Statistics - http://www.childhelp.org/pages/statistics

truTV Crime Library - The Killing of Polly Klaas - http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/serial_killers/predators/klaas/1.html