BENTON — On Tuesday morning, the parking lot outside the Benton Event Center was dotted with 40 custom yard signs.
They were intended as reminders.
Though there were some duplicates, each bore a person’s face, name and the town in Arkansas where they were last seen.
At the top, white lettering declared the person “missing.”
They dated as far back as Mary “BoBo” Shinn in 1978though hers wasn’t the oldest case represented.
Darla HarperLittle Rock, missing since 1986.
Patsy Clark, Little Rock, missingsince 1987.
Lucas Prassas, Wynne, diagnosed with autism and missingsince 2013.
Aunjolie Coleman, Fort Smith, missing since 2016.
Brooke Allensworth, Oil Trough, a mother of three missingsince 2018.
The faces on the signs represented just a few of the roughly 500 people who are listed as missing in Arkansas on a given day, according to the state attorney general’s office.
Tuesday’s 14th Annual Missing Persons Event marked the day that families of many of those missing could gather to ask questions and grieve together.
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In early June, the personal injury law firm Ladah Law shared the results of a study it conducted based on information from the National Missing Persons Database.
It found that Arkansas had a rate of 11.33 open missing person cases per 100,000 residents of the state.
That made the rate for Arkansas — which had a population of 3.1 million and 352 open cases at the time — eighth in the nation.
For comparison, Alaska, a state with a population of more than 743,000 and 175.73 open cases, was nine times the national average (19.5) and at the top of the list.
“We should be ashamed that we’re No. 8 out of 50 states,” said Arkansas State Police Maj. Stacie rhoads. “We should do a better job of making sure that people are actually being looked for.”
The state is working to make sure that happens.
Rhodes made a presentation Tuesday to her law enforcement peers about changes in the ways missing persons are reported and the public is notified, specifically with Amber Alerts and other alerts about missing and endangered children.
During her presentation, Rhodes shared how recent actions by the Legislature are making it easier for alerts to be issued.
“The last session … they gave us the power to be able to issue Amber Alerts,” Rhodes said. “The other power they gave us (addressed people who asked) ‘what if there’s not enough information, or not enough endangerment (to the child), or we just don’t know what the alternative is?’
“We didn’t want to leave everybody empty-handed. We get calls all the time from the family members and concerned citizens about ‘why wasn’t this an Amber Alert?’ So rather than just turn you away and say there’s nothing we can do to help you, we’re now going to be issuing missing and endangered child advisories, and we’ve always done that, but now there’s a law that says that we will have the ability to do that.”
The purpose of the alert, Rhodes said, was to inform “the thousands of citizens who are on our roadways, who are in our convenience stores, who are at Walmart … so that they can help us find these kids.”
However, Rhodes shared why not every child reported missing has an alert issued for them.
“We don’t ever want our alerts program to become background noise,” she said. “Our alerts should be for those kids who we know are in serious danger.”
Missing children alerts were created in an era when studies had reported that kidnapped children were usually murdered within two hours of being taken, Rhodes said.
“That’s where that ‘endangerment’ piece comes from,” she added. “That’s why we don’t do it for every kid.”
Rhodes said that with the increasing dangers for children on social media, including being lured by sexual predators, the definition of “imminent danger” was being changed to include that.
Arkansas issued eight Amber Alerts in the past year and every child included in those alerts had been recovered, Rhodes said.
That included Sophia Franklin, the pregnant 16-year-old Wisconsin girl who was alleged to have been abducted in February from her Beaver Dam home and later recovered at an Omaha truck stop on April 3.
On Tuesday there were no active Amber Alerts in the state.
As of 12:30 a.m. Tuesday morning, 100 missing children had been recovered in Arkansas.
However, according to a presentation Tuesday by human trafficking and missing children coordinators for the state police, there were 111 missing children on file in the state. Of those, 54 are female and 57 are male.
Thirty-six of them would now be over the age of 18 and 42 have been missing for more than two years.
Rhodes posited that changes in reporting criteria, including that someone no longer has to wait 48 hours to report someone missing, may influence Arkansas’ nationwide rank for open cases.
“Some of our numbers being that high could be because we have such good laws about that now,” Rhodes said.
Roughly 350 law enforcement members and family of missing persons were present Tuesday in Benton.
Law enforcement officers attended to take part in training, while families could bond with one another while also meeting investigators and case workers.
A LANTERN FOR TAMARA
Just before the lunch break Tuesday, the event conducted its annual tradition of “lighting” lanterns in honor of missing people.
Family members walked across a stage with their lanterns and recited their loved ones’ names into a microphone.
One of them was Samoan Bell, 44, of Killeen, Texas.
Bell’s family, including her twin children, attended their second missing persons event in Benton in honor of Bell’s older sister, Tamara Halona Bell.
Tamara Bell, who lived in Pine Bluff, was last seen in May 2020 on Green Mountain Drive in Little Rock.
At the time of her disappearance, she was 45, 5-foot-9, 110 pounds with black hair and brown eyes.
Questions about Tamara Bell — who was bipolar — and her disappearance centered around her husband, Corey Walker Jr., and strange text messages sent from her phone to Bell’s father.
On June 5, 2020, Walker was found dead after officers responded to a report of gunshots at 8 a.m. around the 100 block of Larch Street near the Martha Mitchell Expressway in Pine Bluff.
Walker’s car was found crashed into a utility pole, while Walker was found inside dead from a gunshot wound.
Initially ruled a homicide, authorities would call Walker’s death a suicide days later, before that was retracted by the Pine Bluff Police Department.
According to Samoan Bell, after Walker’s death authorities spoke with his family and learned that Walker had told them he “taken my sister’s life and that nobody would find her.”
Samoan Bell said attending events likes the one in Benton, and the people she’s met, have helped her cope with her sister’s disappearance.
She gets comfort she can’t receive from the Veterans Administration, which is “by the book.”
“These are people who actually have dealt with it, and they know what can help you through the process of learning how to grieve the positive way, instead of thinking that you’re by yourself.”
Samoan doesn’t consider herself a “people person,” but when she’s at the Benton Event Center with others going through what she is, “I feel like I can shed some weight off, just being here and listening to other people’s story and what pushed them to what they’re doing.”
