The Reality Behind the Epidemic of Missing Persons Cases in America

Disclaimer: These cases change quickly, so not all the information in this article may be up to date when published. This is not meant to be a news story, but an analysis.

T.W. This piece talks about sensitive missing persons topics. We send our respect to both families in both of these distressing cases.

The fascination and capitalization of the disappearance of women is nothing new. Societies love to indulge in forensic files episodes on young women who have mysteriously vanished. Thriller movies based on the abduction of teenage girls are watched by millions. YouTube channels and podcasts dedicated to “solving” unsolved cases are consumed as a form of entertainment. Why does our society feed on the neglect of women’s safety? What is so enticing about this trauma?

Society in general loves to see horrible things happen to women, and then they love to see these women saved. There seems to be a common pattern amongst the cases society chooses to take interest in: the victim is almost always white from a secure, maybe even wealthy background. It is almost like poor women, women of color, and queer women are completely exempt from experiencing violence and tragedy. In reality, they are the ones facing it at disproportionate rates. White women who go missing aren’t just found, they become a token and are brought the fiercest forms of justice. White women’s faces are the ones seen on national TV headlines. White women’s faces are the ones on police detectives’ desks. In most cases, missing white girls are often portrayed as damsels in distress, helpless, yet pure. All too often, women of color are victim-blamed, sexualized, and written off as unimportant.

No formal study has to be done to know that society values the safety of white women over the safety of women of color. All one has to do is look at the sheer number of unsolved Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women cases since 1900.

(The answer, by the way, is 25,000).

No matter the color of a woman’s skin, her safety and wellbeing should be of the utmost priority. More attention needs to be brought to the cases that you don’t see on CNN, to the cases that slip under the radar. To illustrate the severity of the issue, we can look at the timelines of the missing person cases of Gabby Petito and Lauren Cho. One case was prioritized and inspected, the other was delayed and dismissed.

Gabby Petito was on a four-month, across the country, road trip with her boyfriend, Brian Laundrie, when she disappeared. In the days leading up to her disappearance, the police were called to handle a domestic altercation between Gabby and Brian. The caller reported they saw Brian hit Gabby. A few days later, the couple posted a YouTube video together, seemingly excited about their journey - it was as if the rough patch between the two had gone.

Clips From Police Body Cam Footage During Domestic Altercation Between Gabby and Brian. Source: Fox 29

Clip From Their YouTube Video A Few Days Later Source: Independent

Gabby’s parents then received some bizarre texts from her phone that felt out of context and out of character. This was during the last days of August. Ten days before Gabby was reported missing, Brian Laundrie returned home to Florida, where he and Gabby shared a home, but without her. Meanwhile, Gabby’s parents in New York hadn’t heard from their daughter in almost two weeks. On September 11th, they filed a missing person report. Four days later on September 15th, after Brian refused to cooperate with the police and was now missing himself, he became a person of interest in the missing persons case of Gabby Petitio. Four days after that on September 19th, remains were found near the last place Gabby’s van was seen in Wyoming. The next day, the FBI got involved and raided Laundrie’s parent’s home, looking for possible evidence. On September 21st, Gabby’s remains were identified, the cause of death being labelled a homicide. Exactly a month later, remains determined to be Laundrie’s were found in a Florida wildlife reserve. For now, a lot of questions remain unanswered. Two lives were lost with little information to explain why, but nevertheless, Gabby’s body was found within a month of her disappearance. The police got involved. The FBI got involved. Not every woman or person who goes missing receives these small, but necessary forms of justice.

Lauren Cho, a Korean American woman of around the same age as Gabby, also recently went missing - EXCEPT she went missing six months ago in San Bernardino, California. Lauren was also on a cross-country road trip; she had left her teaching job in New Jersey to open a food truck in California. Lauren had been staying in an Airbnb in Yucca Valley when she was officially reported missing on June 28, 2021, by friends who saw her walk into the desert in a state of frustration, without her phone, any water, or any food.

The case was first taken on by the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Morongo Basin station. With little leads, no advances were made in Lauren’s case until three months later in September when the Sheriff’s Department put their specialized investigation unit on the case. Why it took three months for them to do this, we might never know. It wasn’t until a month after that on October 9th that human remains were found near Lauren’s Airbnb. A few weeks later, the remains were identified to be Lauren’s. No cause of death has been decided yet. According to the authorities, toxicology reports are still being tested. Homicide looks unlikely, and throughout the months of Lauren’s disappearance, her family urged the case to be looked at as just a missing persons case, without any persons of interest. Cho’s family acknowledged some similarities between Gabby Petito’s case and Lauren’s but felt that no foul play was involved.

Nevertheless, it is clear that Gabby’s case was treated quite differently than Lauren’s. It might have been because foul play was immediately assumed to be a factor by authorities looking for Gabby, while authorities looking for Lauren didn’t see this as an urgency. The amount of attention on Gabby’s case vs Lauren’s could also be attributed to Gabby’s slight social media presence before her disappearance.

While these might have been small factors, other factors were definitely at play. The media behaved similarly to the authorities in choosing only to cover Gabby’s case and rarely Lauren’s. Even if Lauren’s death was just an unfortunate accident due to the elements in the desert rather than something motivated, her case still deserved the same amount of attention.

In general, missing persons cases involving people of color deserve more attention. They deserve to be found, and they deserve justice. Gabby Petito’s case became a sort of wake-up call for the nation, and even for the world. Many Americans realized domestic violence is still prevalent in the next generation of adults, and toxic relationships are still normalized. Americans also realized the enormous number of missing people in this country, and how the FBI doesn’t get involved in most of these cases, because often they don’t feel the need to. Gabby’s life was precious, and it mattered. Her case should have gotten as much attention as it did. It is a shame that while her case received so much attention, other cases were just completely ignored, like that of Lauren Cho’s. I think we as a society can all agree on that.

Prejudices can appear subconsciously. It happens when national media companies chose to cover Gabby’s case over the thousands of Indigenous women missing throughout the country, over the hundreds of transgender women being targeted and abused on our streets, and over the countless people of color going missing each year. Americans can see the disparities that so many often try to argue are not there.