As of New Year's Eve 2011, a Georgia teenager named Galilea Magana remains on the long list of other missing people still unaccounted for this year across the country. The list includes FBI cases, like Ashely Summers, another 14-year-old, as well as Aliayah Lunsford, who disappeared in Weston, West Virginia this year.
According to the FBI, child exploitation investigations is growing within the federal agency due to increasing child missing person cases and sex trafficking and pornography. Between 1996 and 2009, in fact, the FBI had a 2,535 percent increase in such investigations.
The Innocence Lost National Initiative (ILNI), an FBI program geared to rescue children from prostitution, has successfully recovered as many as 1,300 such children to date, and says the average age of a child targeted by criminals for prositution purposes is between 11 and 14.
Missing persons not all victims of sex crimes
Not all missing children or persons or the victim of prostitution or sex trafficking schemes, however, as some are murdered and others choose to willing run away.
In Georgia, 7-year-old Jorelys Rivera was allegedly rapped, stabbed and murdered before being tossed into a trash bin at the complex where she lived with her mother and two younger siblings. Her alleged killer, Ryan Brunn, is a 20-year-old maintenace worker that was employed by River Ridge Apartments--and also lived there--when he allegedly abducted the child after she left the playground area alone.
Other missing person cases, like that of John P. Wheeler III, can result in a murder with no signs of sexual crime activity. Wheeler's case, at its one-year anniversary this New Year's Eve, is still unsolved despite an extensive police investigation and autopsy and toxicology completion and results.
When missing person cases result in no body or contact
Some missing person cases are never solved, with case file details continuing to gather dust in files of local, state and federal law enforcement agencies all over the U.S.
Families of such missing persons tell stories of angst over "not knowing" or being unable to decide which is worse: hearing of their loved one's brutal death, not knowing if they are still victims, or wondering if they really did leave of their own accord, as some do.
Galilea Magana's family say she was last seen on Dec. 19 when she accompanied her mother for a Christmas shopping trip at Jackson County's Tanger Outlet Mall. The 14-year-old girl left to go to the restroom and never returned. No one in her family has heard from her since her disappearance and WSB TV's interview of a relative described Magana's mother as being too overcome with grief to even talk to reporters.
FBI ViCAP Missing Persons
You can be part of the missing person solution by aiding law enforcement with any information you have about a missing child or adult. One way to do this is to look through these 30 FBI ViCAP missing person cases, to see if you recognize anyone that may now be living in your community under a different name.
References: FBI, WSB TV
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