“Finding OUR Black Girls”

Eric D. Townsend

English 101 MWF

Professor Jones

April 13, 2020

My initial interest in the unexplained disappearances of black women and girls

began on July 6, 2001, with a mysterious story that has still yet been resolved.

Sisters Diamond Bradley, aged three, and Tionda Bradley, aged ten, seemingly

vanished into thin air after the older sister, Tionda, left a handwritten note for their

mother informing her of them going to the store and the neighborhood park. For a

couple of weeks, their faces were on every news station, on every newspaper, and
their names were coming off the lips of almost everyone in Cook County. Just like

the two sisters disappeared, so did their memory from the news stations,

newspapers, and lips of those who spoke their names. That was a problem.

Even more locally, a pregnant, twenty-six year old postal worker named Kierra

Coles went missing October 26, 2018 from her driveway on the Southside of

Chicago. A woman that lived next door to me in Robbins, Illinois, named Eunice

Franklin, went missing November 10, 2019, from in front of her home. Keyera

Perrigrew went missing June 24, 2013, also from in front of her house. This pattern

of disappearances has been happening in and around Chicago for the past nineteen

years. That is a problem.

Since 2001, the year that Diamond and Tionda vanished, 64,000 black women and

girls have gone missing nationwide, according to the Black & Missing Foundation.

In terms of Chicago and the South Suburban Cook County area, there is no public,

official compiled data to give a credible statistic on missing black girls. Using the

Black & Missing Foundation numbers, there are thirty-nine black women and girls

from our area with active missing persons cases.

Even more troubling and disturbing, since 2001, fifty-one mostly black women and

girls have been found beaten, strangled, and dumped in alleys, dumpsters, and

abandoned houses, mostly throughout the South and West sides of Chicago. It

wasn’t until the invaluable research of the Murder Accountability Project that led

to the compiled data of similar characteristics that authorities realized that most of

these cases were related.

For almost nineteen years, black women either fell from the face of the earth, or

worse, have been the prey of a serial killer that has felt emboldened by the inaction

of law enforcement. Historically for black women and people in general, there has

been an expectation of indifference and insensitivity from law enforcement versus

when a white woman or person goes missing. That is still an expectation that must

end. If it doesn’t, more black girls will go missing or brutally murdered, and will

further drive a wedge between law enforcement and the black community.

To combat and ultimately solve the problem of missing black women and girls

throughout Chicago and South Suburban Cook County, there is a two-part solution

to centralize data to compile statistics that can be a valuable resource for state and

federal law enforcement to match missing black women and unsolved murders,

and use an already formed task force to further investigate the remaining missing
persons cases . The Murder Accountability Project has technical infrastructure that

assembles the country’s most comprehensive accounting of unsolved murders

according to the FBI’s Supplemental Homicide Report. 27,000 homicides cases are

obtained from various police departments in every jurisdiction across the country,

even those law enforcement departments that don’t voluntarily participate in

reporting crime statistics to the federal government.

The first part would be for police departments to report missing persons cases, in

addition to unsolved murders, to be compiled into data specifically for missing

persons based on similar characteristics that can be compared with data for

unsolved murders to see if they overlap for a match. The second part would be for

the compiled missing persons data of black women to be shared with the Chicago

Police Department and FBI Missing Black Women TaskForce, and the South

Suburban Major Crimes Task Force to streamline investigatory options.

A great example of the MAP algorithm data being shared to clear unsolved murder

and missing persons cases of black women and girls happened in Hammond,

Indiana. In 2010, the algorithm generated information about a possible serial

murderer terrorizing greater Gary, Indiana when it connected the unsolved

strangulation murders of fifteen black women across Gary from 1991-2007. In

2014, Hammond police arrested Darren Deon Vann. Gary police had initially

refused to admit the mere possibility of a serial murderer being active in their

community. After Vann’s arrest, he further confessed to the murders of six

additional black women reported missing in Lake County, Indiana.

The objections to these workable solutions would be from the various jurisdictions

involved. Just concerning Chicago and the South Suburbs of Cook County, there

could be upwards of thirty law enforcement departments involved, sharing data

and information. One can assume that the flow of this information can get

confusing or outright lost. This is why sharing information and data from a single

law enforcement department every thirty days, directly to MAP would be a

sufficient enough action to any objections.

Although the solutions provided may be beyond helpful in locating missing black

women and girls throughout Chicagoland, it won’t be effective enough to stop the

disappearance of the girls. Those that are family members of the missing can at

least know that something is being done to find the whereabouts of the loved ones.

MAP has already proved to be accurate in finding a serial murder in Gary, Indiana,

responsible for the murders of twenty-one black women. More recently, Arthur

Hilliard was arrested for the murder of twenty-one year old Diamond Turner. She
went missing March 3, 2017. Her killer was apprehended using the algorithm

created by the Murder Accountability Project. Hilliard’s DNA was also connected

to another murder of the fifty-one unsolved murders. Further, adding missing

persons to the algorithm will increase information law enforcement has to

effectively find our black girls.