The Other Missing Kids
They quickly faded from headlines and public attention
BAY AREA -- You have never heard much about Toni Clark, the 17- year-old girl who vanished mysteriously off the Bay Bridge eight years ago. Or Clark Handa, the 3-year-old snatched from his Fairfield bedroom 14 years ago under his parents' noses.
They were not like Polly Klaas or Amber Swartz-Garcia, or any of the dozens of others who became unlucky poster kids for the plight of missing children in the past decade or so.
Toni and Clark were just as gone, just as loved. But the difference is that they were largely ignored by the public and media. And they still are -- like most of the 150 other children snatched by strangers each year in America.
What makes one missing kid a headline when most others get nary a mention on the nightly news is a quirky, often infuriating mixture of luck, race, class and judgment. When everything works right, in those rare instances when a missing child gets publicity and is actually rescued from the horror of abduction, it all works well.
Most often, though, nothing works and the ending is grisly, as with the discovery of 12-year-old Polly's body in 1993 and, just last month, that of 15-year-old Lisa Norrell of Pittsburg, found dead after a one-week manhunt. Lisa's killer is still on the loose.
Or there is no ending at all, just endless waiting year after year.
And it is one thing to wait, with reporters or police coming to your door at least on special dates, as was the case with 13-year-old Christina Williams of Seaside, snatched last June, and with 9- year-old Michaela Garecht of Hayward, kidnapped 10 years ago. But it is quite another to wait alone. Like the parents of Toni and Clark.
``I don't care what anyone says, what anyone does, I am never giving up looking for my baby,'' said Gwen Clark of San Bruno, whose daughter Toni is 26 if she is still alive. ``I think she was abducted, by somebody wacko.
``My daughter's story never got the kind of notice it should have, but that doesn't stop me. I will never give up. She is alive.''
Toni was driving home after visiting a cousin in Oakland on March 16, 1990, when her Chevrolet Camaro stalled on the Bay Bridge just before midnight. Another car rammed the stopped Camaro, and when police came to check it out, Toni was gone.
The Coast Guard dragged the bay and found nothing. Police eventually phased out the case, figuring that Toni must have been knocked off the bridge by the car that rammed hers, then disappeared under the waves.
But to this day, at least five local and national missing-children organizations still carry her poster and take calls with tips. Quietly. Otherwise, she is mostly forgotten outside her family.
``I know she was taken off that bridge because she called me a week later,'' Gwen Clark said. ``I picked up the phone and for 40 seconds, I heard a female voice -- my daughter's -- crying and crying. I kept saying `Hello, hello,' and then the line cut off.'' The phone company could not trace the call.
A few newspaper articles were written about Toni, and then no more. But Gwen Clark, a struggling single mother with another daughter, 15-year-old Clarissa, kept hunting between shifts as a retail store manager.
She soon found, like the parents of other missing kids who are either minorities -- the family is black -- or older than 13, that public interest wanes fast.
``Gwen would put up posters around town, then come back later to find them ripped down,'' said Chris Wilder of the Vanished Children's Alliance in San Jose, which keeps Toni's case file open. ``Newspapers wouldn't write about it. People didn't pay attention, and law enforcement didn't act as diligently as we wish.
``We're convinced she was abducted. We think everyone else should have been convinced, too.''
Police in San Bruno, Toni's hometown, say they did everything they could. They helped bring the driver who hit Toni's car up on manslaughter charges in 1991, but without a body or conclusive evidence, he was not convicted.
``We can understand Mrs. Clark's grief, but we disagree with her,'' said Sergeant Craig McKee- Parks. ``We think Toni's body was swept out past the Golden Gate. It tears your heart out.''
It would be easy to blame the lack of community or media response to cases like Toni's on race, class, age and capricious media indifference, say law enforcement and other experts. And to some extent, the blame is justified. But it is not that simple.
``The most important thing is the community response,'' said Marylin Adair, manager at the Amber Foundation for Missing Children, formed after 7-year-old Amber Swartz-Garcia vanished from Pinole in 1988. ``If they pull together and start printing posters and putting out the word, organizations like ours start coming in, and it's like a storm gets going.
``But I can never figure out exactly why some kids get known and others don't. I think it's luck.''
Paula Fass, author of ``Kidnapped: Child Abduction in America,'' studied disappearances dating to the 1800s and concluded that -- in descending order -- the factors that determine publicity are attractiveness, race, age, and economic class.
``Attractive children, like Polly Klaas, will become a sort of poster child for missing kids,'' said Fass, who teaches history at the University of California at Berkeley. ``So do white kids, and anyone under 13 or 14. These children become the means by which our society shows it cares, and the fact is that kids who don't fit these descriptions don't fill the bill as easily in our society.''
She said that although missing girls seem to hit the news more than boys, both are equally likely to be publicized, as evidenced by the case of Kevin Collins, 10, of San Francisco, who was never found after disappearing in 1984. And the minority bias seems to be abating as the media and public get more sophisticated about missing-child cases, she said, pointing to the huge searches for Christina, a Filipina, and Lisa, a Latina, as examples.
Class comes into play because people who are middle-class or higher are more accustomed to working the system, experts said. This does not mean poor people never get publicity -- Michaela Garecht's parents were unemployed, for instance -- but they need community support more.
The cases that get the most media coverage are the most simply defined -- where it is clear that a bad guy snatched a nice little child. ``Any ambiguity, and it starts slipping down the charts,'' Fass said.
That is why runaways and parental abductions, the vast majority of child disappearances, do not get much notice, even though police and child-search groups treat them seriously. This is not automatically bad, said Ben Bagdikian, former dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
``Journalism is a matter of selecting a few things out of an incredible multitude of possibilities,'' Bagdikian said. ``There are hundreds of crimes every day, hundreds of accidents, hundreds of missing children cases, and it's impossible to cover them all.''
Most police agencies say they treat every missing child equally, as they are required to under a 1990 federal law that mandates that officers immediately launch searches. But the reality is that they cannot: Every year, there are at least 125,000 missing-child reports in California alone.
``We can't make a big deal to the media out of every case. It's impossible,'' said officer Patrick Mahanay of the Oakland Police Missing Person's Unit. ``If we did that, with all the runaways and other kinds we get, nobody would notice anymore.''
According to the California Department of Justice, only 81 of last year's 130,605 children reported missing were confirmed as snatched by strangers. Some 120,180 were runaways and 2,793 were abducted by relatives. Nationally, stranger abductions are pegged each year at about 150.
The stranger-kidnapping figures are vigorously disputed by groups like the Vanished Children's Alliance, which contends that the national figure is closer to 3,500. But even they agree that the stranger cases are always just a sliver of the total -- and very few get publicized widely.
Regardless of the number of cases, the other thing everyone agrees on is that only a fraction of child kidnappings get solved. And in most, a body is never found.
Sometimes the parents never give up, like Toni's. Sometimes grief consumes them, like the family of Mitchell Owens.
Mitchell was 5 in 1983 when he walked into his mother's room in their Menlo Park home and found a man raping her. Ora Owens screamed at Mitchell to hide as the rapist strangled her, but when she woke up two days later in a hospital, her son was gone.
``People didn't take much notice of that case either, maybe because they were black,'' said Wilder of the Vanished Children's Alliance. ``Ora kept looking for Mitchell for so many years, and then finally we just lost contact. The grief was very heavy on her.''
And then there are those who struggle to put the past behind them without forgetting.
Clark Handa's parents do not really talk about their son's disappearance anymore. The pain cuts too deep, said his uncle, Earl Handa, -- especially with the boy's birthday coming up tomorrow.
Clark was kidnapped Aug. 22, 1984, in the same way that Polly Klaas was: Some broke into his bedroom and took him. Clark's abductor left a ransom note but never followed up to collect.
``He's 18 now, if he's still alive,'' Earl Handa said with a sigh. ``We all miss him just as much as we ever did, but we don't talk about it. All we can do is mark his birthday in our hearts. We won't gather around and light candles.''
