Streeter: When a child goes missing, it should shake us all

The first thing I thought when I saw the picture was “Hey, that looks like my kid.”

Of course, Tristan King, the 9-year-old missing for several months who was found two days after The Banner published a story about his case, is not my child. But it was terrifying to imagine that, in another situation, he could be. It could be any of our kids, slipping through myriad cracks in so many systems that should have been fortified. And it’s terrifying that those holes seem to be gaping.

“If you go missing and no one notices, it says a lot about the system,” said Kaye Wise Whitehead, a Loyola University professor of communications and African and African-American studies.

Tristan was discovered in Curtis Bay after nearly six months in the wind, becoming the longest-missing Maryland child his age. His story reads like a Dickensian tragedy set in a frightening modern age: His grandmother and legal guardian, who took custody from his birth mother, had a stroke and was confined to a nursing home. Baltimore City Public Schools unenrolled him in the aftermath of her illness after he missed 10 days of school. The Department of Human Services had brief authority over him, but he leapt from a caseworker’s car and was missing until March 13.

Bonnie Marquez of Carroll County, who runs a Facebook group called “Missing In Baltimore City” that helps families look for lost loved ones, received notifications about Tristan shortly after he went missing in September. “I heard he was heading to his aunt, and he didn’t want to be held,” she said. “People were like ‘He’s been found,’ and then all of a sudden he wasn’t, not by CPS.”

How does this happen? I know something about foster care and kinship care, when children are placed with family members if their birth parents cannot raise them. My son, the birth child of a relative, was never in any danger of going missing: He went home with a foster family in Baltimore County at four days old before coming to live with my late husband and me in Florida. It was a heartbreakingly slow process of interstate placement and monthly visits here until we took him home with us at six months continuing for the next year and a half until his adoption was finalized. I could not do so much as change a doorknob or have long houseguests without prior approval. The circumstances around Tristan’s life are drastically and wholly different from mine and my child’s, but I still don’t know how kids get lost.

Marquez said when her youngest son was absent 10 days for a flu that took down the whole household, someone from his school “came to my house and said, ‘We gotta see him, we gotta see he’s OK.’”

I admit I initially avoided reading The Banner’s stories about Tristan because it was just too painful to imagine my child might be out there somewhere alone, with me powerless to bring him home. The news hit at what, in the spirit of discretion, I’ll say was a particularly challenging parenting week in my new routine of dealing with a preteen. If you know, you know.

Even in his most obnoxious tweening, it would kill me to not know where he was if he were gone for an hour, and I have at least four different sets of family and friends legally identified to care for him if I couldn’t.

It’s also important to note that both Tristan and my son are little brown boys, not the ones who usually have sad national stories or cheesy Lifetime movies dedicated to them.

It’s part of “Missing White Women Syndrome,” a term coined by the late journalist Gwen Ifill, about the phenomenon of lost Black, Hispanic and Native people — particularly women and children — not receiving the same local or media coverage as those who are pretty and white. Whitehead, a WEAA 88.9 radio host, confirmed that she had not heard of Tristan’s case until he was found. And Marquez told me that while posts of missing white kids may get shared thousands of times on her Facebook group, “the ones with Black kids don’t get shared as much.”

According to a chart from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children breaking down missing children by age and race/ethnicity, 29,568 kids were reported missing to them in 2024, with the bulk of them (10,678) being Black. These numbers aren’t just random ones and zeros, but somebody’s baby who should be home.

There have been 268 children from birth to 17 years old reported missing this year in Baltimore, according to statistics and demographic information provided by Police Department spokesperson Lindsey Eldridge. Of that total, 152 have been found. (Tristan is one of 13 children reported missing in 2025 who has been found this year.) Black kids account for the large majority of this year’s missing cases, followed by white children and Latino children.

If the system doesn’t hold, what can outside forces do to find these kids? Decades ago, Whitehead said, pictures of missing children were printed on milk cartons. And in 1993, the band Soul Asylum released three versions of their “Runaway Train” video that featured the faces and names of 36 missing kids, 21 of whom were eventually reported found.

But the milk cartons and videos on MTV are gone. Social media has become that digital bulletin board, but it only works if those posts are spread widely and amplified.

It’s easy to place blame from outside the circumstances, and it seems that for the moment, Tristan is safe; his grandmother knows where he is. Maybe this debacle will make the system that much more vigilant the next time a little boy or girl does not come home.

But as a parent, I feel desperately less safe knowing this ever happened in the first place because of my own little brown boy.