AR AR - Derrick Foster, 13, North Little Rock, 4 Mar 1995

[ChatteringBirds]

Has his mother or any other relatives ever spoken out?
Did his father ever make a plea for him to come home?
This was the '90s, not decades earlier. Everyone knew how vulnerable a 13-year-old child was.

 

[Rikissa]

Has his mother or any other relatives ever spoken out?
Did his father ever make a plea for him to come home?
This was the '90s, not decades earlier. Everyone knew how vulnerable a 13-year-old child was.

I would guess that to find the answers to your two questions, you need to go and look up the physical newspapers published in the area where he went missing. Remember that 1995 was just the beginning of the internet boom, and not all information was published online then. Much of todays social media didn't exist back then, and if he had quickly been found safe, maybe LE hadn't been informed.

 

[doublestop]

The only thing relating to Derrick that I could find in newspaper archives is an ad put out by NCMEC in 1996 and again in 1999. I could find no articles at all. His middle name is Mac.

 

[Rikissa]

The only thing relating to Derrick that I could find in newspaper archives is an ad put out by NCMEC in 1996 and again in 1999. I could find no articles at all. His middle name is Mac.

Do you have a link to those ads, I would like to see them before I add his middle name to the title of this thread.

I did a quick search and looked up how much of old US newspapers have been made available online. The AI Overview showed that in 2015 about 90% of newspapers were unscanned. There was also a mentioning that in National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) in 2022 there were online access to newspapers published between 1777 and 1963. At Newspapers.com the amount of coverage from different states varies, in 2022 from 69% of newspapers published in Nebraska, to less than 10% in Washington State and Massachusetts. I didn't look up Arkansas newspapers, but it would be interesting to know how much of their old newspapers are available online.

 

[doublestop]

Do you have a link to those ads, I would like to see them before I add his middle name to the title of this thread.

Here is a link but it's behind a paywall. Oct 22, 1996, page 48 - The Spokesman-Review at Newspapers.com™

If you can't see that, I can put up an image of the ad and you can delete it after you see it if you want? It's the same ad in multiple papers.