Editor’s note: Tristan King was found in Baltimore’s Curtis Bay neighborhood on March 13, two days after this story’s publication. He was taken to a hospital for evaluation and is under the care of the Maryland Department of Human Services.
The United States marshals arrived just as the Brooklyn neighborhood began to wake. Wearing tactical gear and wielding long guns, they pulled up in unmarked cars to snow-covered Maude Avenue and stepped into the frigid dawn.
Their mission: find 9-year-old Tristan King.
He has been missing since Sept. 24, longer than any other child his age in Maryland, through one of Baltimore’s coldest winters on record.
A police poster shows a blurry photo of a little boy with curly hair and deep-brown eyes. It describes him as 4-foot-8, 90 pounds, last seen wearing a white sweater and blue NBA pajama pants. Call if spotted.
What it doesn’t say is that the past year of Tristan’s life was a procession of misery and mishaps, or that red tape and mistakes hampered the agencies responsible for finding him.
His grandmother and legal guardian suffered a stroke in May that confined her to a nursing home. His school unenrolled him two weeks later when he didn’t show up. In July, his house burned down and he wound up living in a tent with his great-aunt, who has a drug addiction. She turned him over to the Maryland Department of Human Services when her need to get high overtook her ability to care for the boy she’d held as a baby.
Briefly, Tristan was in the physical custody of the state. This could have been a chance for him to get help and find a stable home. But it was only for one night; the day after his great-aunt gave him up, he jumped out of his caseworker’s car.
The boy who should be in third grade has been running ever since. Over the last five months, he’s been spotted in his old neighborhood riding a bike, visiting the corner store and walking the street. There’s no way to know for certain where he sleeps at night or got his last meal.
The Baltimore Police Department and the Department of Human Services said they’re working in “close collaboration” and using “every tool available” to find him.
Yet he’s evaded the trained professionals whose job it is to bring him to safety. Social workers didn’t acknowledge emails and texts raising concerns about Tristan’s well-being and whereabouts. The Baltimore Police Department has received more than two dozen 911 calls reporting Tristan sightings, but none of them helped bring him in. Detectives took months to interview key figures, including Tristan’s grandmother. At one point, they mistakenly closed his case.
Even if social workers or police locate him, there may be little they can do. Their policies prevent them from physically restraining children. The little boy would have to come willingly. Authorities say this is unlikely because people are helping him hide.
“These dynamics have added a level of complexity to this case that has not been seen in any other case,” Baltimore Police spokesperson Lindsey Eldridge said.
So when the squad of federal agents pulled up on Maude Avenue in early February, it marked the most aggressive effort to find Tristan since he went missing. They gathered outside the house where tipsters said Tristan might be.
The marshals banged on the door loud enough that neighbors around the corner could hear. Dogs barked. An ambulance siren tore through the tension.
Then the door opened. The marshals were going in.
‘Love him to pieces’
The baby smiled as his great-aunt held him by his arms and danced him for the camera.
“You are my Tris-tan, my only Tris-tan. You make me hap-py when skies are gray,” Denise Day crooned.
It was October 2017, almost a month after Tristan’s 1st birthday. His mother posted the video online, one of the rare times she was around. She was using drugs and lost custody of Tristan to her mother, Donna White, soon after his birth.
White and her sister, Day, raised him together in a rented house on Horton Avenue, a block from a park with a playground and a skyline view. White, whom Tristan calls Nana, documented baby Tristan’s tummy time, doctor visits and sleep habits on Facebook. She baptized him at St. John, the neighborhood Lutheran church, and took him to JCPenney for Christmas pictures.
“Can’t help it,” White wrote. “Love him to pieces.”
As Tristan grew older, behavioral problems emerged. He was diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder, which can manifest as angry outbursts toward parents and authority figures. A mother of three and grandmother to several, White said on Facebook that Tristan was the hardest kid she’d raised, a “holy terror.”
“I’m sitting down with him trying to talk to him and asking him why do you do these things now mind you he’s 7 and he says to me if you were a better parent maybe I would be a better kidsmfh,” she wrote.
Tristan’s home life was tumultuous. Day has an addiction, several people who know the family said. Street life — fighting and drugs — spilled into the house. Tristan started using marijuana as early as age 7; White said her sister encouraged him to do it to calm him down.
Sometimes Tristan came to school dirty, and staff at Maree G. Farring Elementary/Middle called Child Protective Services, an agency under the Department of Human Services. White said those reports were “unfounded,” but wouldn’t go into detail.
School employees worked hard to help Tristan. Maree G. Farring’s school psychologist, Lisa Austin, said Tristan could be a menace but would soften once he trusted you. Tristan visited her office regularly, snacking on beef jerky and chatting in the cozy, softly lit room covered with cat posters.
He needed more support than Maree G. Farring offered, and in April school leaders transferred him to Sharp-Leadenhall Elementary/Middle, a 29-student school for high-needs kids near downtown.
But Tristan didn’t go to class.
Then in early May, White had a stroke and was hospitalized. She was later moved to a nursing home in nearby Brooklyn Park. On paper, she remained her grandson’s legal guardian, but Day became his de facto caregiver.
“She was the only choice,” White later said of her sister. “Not a good choice.”
Baltimore City Public Schools unenrolled Tristan on May 19 because he missed more than 10 days in a row, leaving fewer people alert to signs of trouble at home.
Austin worried about her former student. Even though he was no longer enrolled in school, she emailed a social worker who had overseen Tristan’s case.
“There are some SUPER concerning things going on,” she wrote, according to correspondence reviewed by The Banner.
The worker wrote back a day later to say she wasn’t involved with Tristan’s case anymore and included a colleague who might be.
That was the last Austin heard from the agency for months.
The fire, the bulldozer and the motel
The fire started just after 10 a.m. on a hot Sunday in late July. Black smoke poured out the back of the Horton Avenue house where Tristan lived with Day.
Investigators ruled the fire accidental, blaming it on long-standing electrical problems or perhaps someone smoking inside.
Tristan’s grandmother learned about the fire while still recovering from her stroke at a long-term care facility. She told one of her best friends, Shirell Wright, and asked her to check on her grandson and sister.
When Wright went to the burned-out home in August, she said Tristan and Day emerged from a tent in the alley wearing soiled clothes and stepping around garbage and charred debris.
Day told Wright she was doing her best and didn’t know where else to go. She had not always been this way. Years earlier, Day owned a Fort Avenue bar and raised two kids of her own.
“I kind of blew up at her,” Wright said. She drove away furious and in tears.
She consulted a friend, calmed down and came back another day to try to convince them to leave.
Wright said Day was using fentanyl. She wanted Day to get clean and White to get discharged. Then the sisters could rent a home using their government benefits and the money White received as Tristan’s guardian.
Wright returned at least 10 more times over the next month, without success. At this point, people who saw Tristan described him as skittish around adults, hesitant to get close.
It was Aug. 26 when Austin, the school psychologist, dashed off another urgent email to Department of Human Services workers. She had just learned about the fire that destroyed Tristan’s home.
“This student is in an even worse situation than he was at the end of last year. He is homeless and has no supervision/guardianship,” she wrote, adding she was “genuinely concerned for his safety.”
Austin received no response. Two days later, she emailed again.
“Please let me know who I can escalate this situation to if you are not able to address these very significant concerns. That this case was dismissed or lost in some sort of shuffle is beyond unacceptable,” she wrote on Aug. 28.
The same day, another school employee made a formal report of neglect to Child Protective Services regarding Tristan. That employee spoke to The Banner on the condition of anonymity out of concern for their job.
Neither received a response.
A Department of Human Services official defended the silence, citing state and federal confidentiality laws limiting the information that can be shared about active investigations.
“Individuals who make reports are not entitled to receive updates on investigative activities, findings, or outcomes,” Ben Shnider, the department’s communications director, wrote in an email. However, workers in Tristan’s case would occasionally reply to Austin or others to ask questions or provide updates.
He added that the most effective way to report concerns is through the agency’s child abuse and neglect hotline.
But a situation like Tristan’s — a child living in a tent with an adult who isn’t his legal guardian — wouldn’t automatically qualify as neglect.
“Neither homelessness nor temporary living arrangements with family alone would meet the legal standard required for removal,” Shnider said.
There was one government agency taking action. On Sept. 9, the city housing department came to clean, vacate and board up the burned-out home. Wright watched workers with a bulldozer clear out the alley.
After that, something changed. It’s not clear what triggered Human Services to get involved, but the next day, Austin heard back from a social worker assigned to Tristan’s case. She connected the social worker with Day.
On Sept. 12, Day and Tristan checked into a motel paid for by the state: the Americas Best Value Inn in Northeast Baltimore. Wright said she drove them herself and brought them food and clean clothes.
For a brief moment, life seemed OK.
At the motel, Tristan celebrated his 9th birthday. He shared his cake with other guests, and Wright gave him a football. A social worker and Austin texted about possibly re-enrolling him in school. Wright said Day seemed optimistic about the future.
The break from chaos proved fleeting.
Day was on the cusp of fentanyl withdrawal, Wright said, and although she had asked one of Tristan’s caseworkers for a referral to drug treatment, no help had materialized. So Wright, desperate to keep Day at the motel with Tristan, did something she said she “never should have done.” She bought Day drugs.
“It’s against my principles,” Wright said.
She told Day she wouldn’t do it again, and Day became desperate to return to Brooklyn to get high, Wright said. The great-aunt called Child Protective Services on Sept. 23 to let them know she could not care for Tristan. Then she called Wright and told her, too.
A caseworker collected Tristan within an hour.
A boy goes missing
The day before Tristan’s great-aunt gave him up, the Department of Human Services descended into a crisis involving a different kid.
Kanaiyah Ward, a 16-year-old in foster care, died in an East Baltimore hotel where she’d been living since August. The coroner determined she overdosed on medication that a state-contracted aide failed to lock up. Her mother said she was suicidal and the state knew it.
Ward’s death incensed advocates who’d warned for years against placing children in unlicensed settings like hotels. A legislative audit released shortly before her death detailed the department’s persistent child welfare shortcomings. Lawmakers called for the Human Services secretary’s resignation, and within a month, the department said it would stop housing foster children in hotels.
Days after Ward’s death, the agency lost Tristan.
On Sept. 24, the day after Tristan came into the state’s physical custody, his caseworker drove him to see his grandmother at the nursing home where she’d been living for months. The Department of Human Services had started the legal process to take custody of him. Following a court hearing, Tristan would likely enter foster care.
While visiting White, the boy kept trying to run from the caseworker, stopped only by the facility’s many locked doors.
At one point, White recalled, Tristan gave the worker a warning: “I’m going to jump out of your car.”
True to his word, Tristan bolted from the worker’s green Jeep Compass at the busy intersection of Potee Street and Patapsco Avenue. He was four blocks from his former home. Everyone assumed he was running back to Day.
When a child under the supervision of the Department of Human Services runs away, caseworkers must immediately file a missing person report and document all reasonable efforts to locate the child each week. But this policy only applies to kids in foster care, and because Tristan ran off before his court hearing, he legally remains in White’s custody.
Tristan is unusually young for a runaway. At the end of 2025, there were 39 kids in state care who were considered missing, according to Human Services, and none was under age 13.
Tristan isn’t included in this count; the state’s petition to put Tristan in foster care remains pending.
Shnider, the department’s communications director, said agency staff are doing “everything in their power to find Tristan.”
“Any insinuation otherwise demonstrates a lack of understanding of the complex legal principles at play and is a disservice to both your readers and the truth,” he said.
‘I had him in my arms’
Just five days after Tristan ran, Heather Thomas nearly got him off the street.
Thomas, White’s stepdaughter, learned of Tristan’s disappearance from a friend who saw the Baltimore Police Department’s Facebook post about him. Thomas and her husband, Rush, called a babysitter for their two children and drove from their Rosedale home to search for Tristan.
“I thought he might not be found alive,” she said.
But they quickly spoke to someone who said he’d seen Tristan and his friends. Then she spotted him.
Thomas called 911 on Sept. 29 to say she’d found the missing child. Tristan was hungry, so they grabbed dinner from nearby Texas Pizza on Patapsco Avenue. They planned to bring Tristan home with them.
Tristan asked to stop at Horton Avenue first. He wanted to tell Day goodbye.
Then Baltimore Police rolled into the alley, responding to Thomas’ call, she said. Tristan panicked, yelling, cursing and throwing things.
Thomas got on the phone with a caseworker who approved her to take temporary custody. But the situation wasn’t settled. After 90 minutes, police got an urgent call for a reported shooting and had to leave.
Still frantic, Tristan refused to get into Thomas’ car. He took off running as the sun set. Thomas said she and her husband chased and grabbed him, only for him to wriggle free.
“I had him in my arms,” Thomas said. “I had him. And then he got away.”
The couple returned to Brooklyn four times that week and found Tristan each time, Thomas said. She stayed in touch with Tristan’s caseworker, but the Thomases were mostly on their own, she said.
They told Tristan he could play as much Xbox as he wanted if he came with them. They offered to adopt his black cat, Shadow, who survived the fire. And they clashed with Day, who was living in the alley and wanted her own invitation to their home, Thomas said.
Tristan still wouldn’t come with them. Eventually he would run when he saw them. Day coached him to do so, Thomas said.
She is upset that police didn’t ensure Tristan got into her car that first night. She’s angry with Day, too, but understands why Tristan trusts and listens to her.
“Denise is his comfort person,” she said. “What little kid wants to be taken away from their main caregiver?”
Case closed
As the weather cooled, so did the search for Tristan.
Austin texted the workers assigned to Tristan’s case throughout the fall. On Oct. 28, at 2:42 p.m., she sent a more urgent message. Austin told a caseworker Tristan was outside a church wearing a camo sweatsuit.
“I’ll make my way over there,” the caseworker replied 30 minutes later. Austin never heard whether the trip took place.
Austin started to lose patience. People were reporting sightings of Tristan all the time.
“We know where he’s staying, so it can’t be THAT hard to find him and we continue to be frustrated and super concerned,” she texted the caseworker with no reply on Oct. 29.
Thanksgiving passed, then the calendar turned to December. The temperature was dropping. What if Tristan froze to death? White and Austin worried Tristan was hanging with people known to be violent. What if he was killed?
Shnider, the communications director at the Department of Human Services, said workers have searched for Tristan at dozens of businesses and homes based on tips to the child abuse and neglect hotline.
Police missed opportunities, too. Tips and sightings filled the comments on Baltimore Police’s Facebook page. They also received dozens of 911 calls about Tristan sightings but never got him off the street.
On Dec. 10, Austin emailed Maj. Henrietta Middleton, the head of the Police Department’s Southern District, begging for assistance. Subject line: “Missing child.”
“I have been working tirelessly since last May to get this child some help and every agency that is supposed to protect him and keep him safe has failed him and I don’t know what else to do. I know that reaching out to you directly is exceedingly extra and I apologize for any impropriety, but I keep reaching dead ends and closed cases and people trying to check boxes and I don’t know what else to do,” Austin wrote.
The major didn’t write back. Eldridge, the police spokesperson, said Middleton attended to two homicides in the district that day.
On Dec. 17, a week after Austin’s email, something unusual happened — police closed Tristan’s case. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, the clearinghouse for cases like Tristan’s, took his poster off its website.
The judge in Tristan’s state custody case had issued what’s known as a “child in need of supervision” order, or CINS, which is used when a child poses a danger to himself or others and is engaged in “ungovernable behavior.” Tristan had missed court hearings, and the CINS directed authorities to bring him into state care when they encountered him.
Lt. Kyle Gaskin, who oversees Baltimore Police’s missing persons unit, said the CINS looked similar to an arrest warrant in the department’s system. The computers had effectively marked Tristan a fugitive.
But Tristan wasn’t wanted. Children his age cannot be criminally charged.
Gaskin later said he closed the case because if a person is wanted, they aren’t missing; they’re running.
“My mistake,” Gaskin said.
‘Ought to be in jail’
On Dec. 18, Tristan was spotted again.
A woman who knew him from Maree G. Farring called 911 to report she’d seen Tristan walking down Fourth Street in Brooklyn, according to a recording. He was wearing a black ski mask, a white T-shirt and sweatpants. Then the woman alerted Austin.
Fed up with authorities’ inaction, Austin contacted The Banner.
“I tell the story of what happened to Tristan. I have told it to so many people now,” Austin said in December. She said she was not speaking on behalf of the school system. “I expect my words will inspire action, but nothing ever happens. He’s still out there.”
Over the next 24 hours, we went to Tristan’s former school and street corners he’d been said to hang around. Pastors at community food pantries said they’d seen Tristan recently. Perhaps most notably, we visited Donna White, his grandmother.
It had been three months since Tristan jumped out of his caseworker’s car, and police had yet to interview her, White said from bed in her shared room in the nursing home. She didn’t know why. She was still Tristan’s legal guardian.
White uses a wheelchair that she can barely get in and out of. She can’t leave the care center because she would be homeless. Friends visit on occasion. Most days she smokes Newports, watches TV and thinks about her grandson.
Tristan hadn’t taken his medication, prescribed for his behavioral issues, since her stroke, White said. She believed Day, her sister, was actively hiding him.
“She ought to be in jail,” she said.
White said Tristan would be safer in state custody. Child welfare experts told us Tristan would likely need intensive therapeutic care at a residential treatment facility to have a chance at a stable, healthy life.
Most of all, White wanted to tell her grandson she loved him.
“I’d tell him he’s got to stop being bad, he needs to listen,” she said as tears rolled down her cheeks. “I want to be together.”
Eventually, news of Baltimore’s missing boy began to spread. We contacted police and the Department of Human Services about his case. Word of Tristan’s plight even made it to the mayor’s office. By Jan. 8, police had reopened his missing persons investigation, records show.
And The Banner looked for him. We heard he was seen riding a dirt bike. There were tire tracks in the mud near a beat-up car parked in an alley, where he’d reportedly slept with Day. We learned he was usually seen wearing a ski mask. We heard neighbors sometimes fed and clothed him. On brutally cold nights, they brought him inside.
It seemed Brooklyn was, in a way, looking out for him.
The day police reopened his case, we drove around the neighborhood hoping to spot him.
At a time when most kids were in school, a boy sat atop a dirt bike in the Brooklyn Homes public housing complex. He was small and a ski mask hid his face and hair. His eyes, brown like Tristan’s, stared as our car circled the block.
By the time we came back around, the boy was gone.
The search restarts
Detective Milton Scott, a 23-year police veteran, scoured Brooklyn for signs of Tristan. It was Tuesday, Jan. 20, the coldest day of the year so far. Forecasters predicted a snowstorm that weekend.
The police investigation had progressed — they’d finally interviewed White, for instance — and tips helped bring Tristan’s comings and goings into focus.
On this afternoon, Scott handed out flyers with Tristan’s picture; he’d heard Tristan was ripping them down.
He taped one in a corner store window at Fifth Street and Patapsco Avenue. A tip said Tristan had been staying with a family in an apartment upstairs. Scott knocked and there was no answer. A girl poked her head out a window before ducking back inside.
The store cashier remarked he hadn’t seen Tristan in a while. A girl buying an after-school snack said she’d seen him recently. A woman said she thought he was staying with his aunt over on Maude Avenue.
On his missing poster, Tristan’s face is turned down from the camera — but neighbors know who he is and that police are looking for him.
“Oh, Tristan’s little bad ass?” said a man Scott stopped on the street. Yeah, the man has seen him.
“See what I mean?” Scott said as he drove off, frustration bubbling. “Everybody knows. I guarantee I can stop every person around here and they’ll be like, ‘I know Tristan.’ So this is the game we play.”
One of four missing persons detectives for the whole city, Scott belongs to a unit that handles the critical cases: those involving children under 13, older adults and people with mental disabilities. They get about 400 a year. Most involving kids are resolved quickly, within two days.
If police find Tristan, he won’t be placed in handcuffs or forcibly detained, per departmental policy. Because he’s committed no crime, officers won’t chase him either.
Instead, they will call Child Protective Services to collect him. That agency also has a policy against laying hands on children, officials said. Essentially, Tristan has to agree to go with them.
This strategy requires spotting him on the street or gaining access to the homes of the people sheltering him. Police will not enter a building he might be in unless there is evidence of a crime.
Child neglect is a crime in Maryland, but it is rarely charged because it can be difficult to prove in court unless a child dies. It’s Baltimore Police policy not to make arrests on neglect charges alone.
“What is neglect? That’s a tough definition,” Gaskin said. “They’ve got lights, they’ve got shelter, they’ve got food — they’ve got necessities. Are they being neglected? In my eyes, a lot of cases? Yes. Some other people might say no.”
The snow came and detectives’ work continued. The police commissioner gave them permission to search for Tristan with a drone.
But authorities were still slow to interview some of the people who knew the most about Tristan’s whereabouts. Austin, the school psychologist, said detectives contacted her and one of her colleagues for the first time on Feb. 3. She was losing hope they would find him soon.
Two days later, a United States marshal arrived at Maree G. Farring.
Where is Tristan?
The Marshals Service has operated a specialized Missing Child Unit since 2015. Available to local police departments upon request, assistance is reserved for “critically missing children” who face an elevated risk of harm.
In the most recent year for which nationwide data is available, marshals received 1,120 requests to help find missing children. They found 706, most within a week. They didn’t find 414. Kids who might still be out there.
When the marshals took Tristan’s case, their investigation quickly centered on a Maude Avenue home that had been the subject of rumor and speculation for weeks. Unlike Baltimore Police, the marshals can physically restrain missing children who try to run. And they’re more likely to get warrants to enter homes.
The search for Tristan had come to this cold morning in early February.
After briefly entering the front door, the marshals headed around back through the iced-over alley. There was a woman inside, and they pleaded with her to come out and talk.
They threatened to kick in the back door if she refused. She begged the marshals not to shoot the two pit bulls who followed her out.
Her speech was slightly slurred, her energy nervous. The woman mentioned a fire nearby that happened a few months ago.
The conversation was difficult to make out, but this much was clear: Tristan wasn’t there.
Authorities ask anyone with information about Tristan King’s whereabouts to contact either Baltimore Police at 410-361-9929 or U.S. Marshals Senior Inspector Al Maresca Jr. at 202-819-5058, or to dial 911.
Banner reporter Alissa Zhu contributed to this story.
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