What I expected to hear today was that someone had seen him in the past few days/weeks. What I heard instead, consistently, was no one has seen him since summer of last year.
My friend and I made our way to a camp we used to check in on regularly that is next to one of the main shelters and a resource center. Their head of security was very kind and willing to speak with me even though I couldn’t provide her the actual case number of his missing persons at the moment we walked in. She pulled up all the information she had on him and gave me the last intake photo of him from September. He hasn’t checked in at any of the 6 major shelters/resource centers since, and he didn’t check into any of the inclement weather emergency shelters in late January when the week long freeze happened. Not under his legal name anyway. The guard gave me some additional places to call and check for him that she wouldn’t have access to. Dart PD isn’t the same as Dallas PD, so they could have ticketed him for riding the dart. She also said to check with Health & Human Services to see if he’s signed up for food stamps and collecting.
We walked the streets showing his picture seeing if anyone had seen him. Two people said they had seen him that morning - but it didn’t feel genuine. We had goodies to pass out and it seemed like they thought information was necessary for receiving. We came up on a family that we showed his picture to and they were credible. I showed his picture and they asked, “oh, he has false teeth right? Did he loose some of them? He got his phone taken. I know exactly who he is, but he hasn’t been around here since last year. He didn’t seem okay the last time we saw him. Not his usual friendly self.”
One woman told us a body had been found last week so it was worth the call to the morgue.
The friend who went with me has some neighbors who work in AI tech and were willing to help out and see what they could find. They did find he had been arrested in September for theft, there was no bond, and he received a TB test in October, which would align with the 30 day mark in jail. They said 180 days would have been 6 days ago. The detective assigned to his case said he checked the jail and he wasn’t there, but DPD is know to be dismissive of people like my brother. So if he really checked is a big question mark. I finally have the case number and the contact info for the detective, so I’m going to call and align some of the timeline I have with whatever information he has.
My deepest hope is that he’s been sitting in jail all this time and for some reason just hasn’t called. My growing fear, since no one has seen him in so long, is he’s gone.
Loading comments...