53 Hours
By Eunice Brownlee
CW: Missing Child
Recently, an acquaintance of mine posted an Instagram update that her son had been found safe. If I were still using Facebook, I would have known that he had disappeared on his own accord 39 hours earlier. I would have been able to tell her that I completely understood what she was going through because I had lived the same nightmare eighteen months before.
On the evening of January 1, 2020, my daughter disappeared.
New Year’s Eve, she had been given permission to stay with a friend in our neighborhood while I stayed where we were dog sitting for the week. She ditched the friend and headed to downtown Denver with a group of friends I didn’t know, like or trust. I spent hours demanding her to come home. As any thirteen-year-old is wont to do, she ignored every call and text. I knew it would be impossible to find her among the NYE crowds, so I waited and hoped she would come home safely.
In full momma bear mode, I tracked her nearly dead phone and chased her down shortly after 1 a.m. She begrudgingly got in the car and received an earful. When we got back to the house we were staying at, I confiscated her phone and she silently retreated to the bedroom and did not come out until nearly thirteen hours later. I was still seething, and it was clear that so was she.
She joined me in watching a Sex in the City marathon and seemed to soften a little. A few hours later, we swung home for a few things. Even though I had not yet talked to her about the night before, everything seemed fine. It was just after dark when we arrived home, and we darted in to get what we needed. As I was finishing a task in the kitchen, she called, “I’ll be in the car,” and I hollered back, “I’ll be out in two minutes.”
Not more than five minutes later, I hopped into the car and turned to face an empty passenger seat. Surprised, I looked in the back seat. Nothing. I hopped out of the car and called out for her. Nothing.
I got back in the car and drove around the block to see if I could see her. In the blink of an eye, my daughter had disappeared. At first, I thought that maybe she had gotten away so fast because she’d coordinated to have a friend pick her up. I dismissed that thought quickly when I realized that I still had her phone, and it was at the other house.
There’s no way she could have gotten off our block that fast, I thought to myself. I circled two more times, just to be sure, then went back to the house. Nothing.
Shaking, I called the police.
When the officer arrived to take the report, he looked through the house to see if she was hiding somewhere, to no avail. I explained that I wasn’t sure if she ran away or something else happened, and I knew that it hadn’t been 24 hours. He assured me I did the right thing, that you should always call the police the moment someone goes missing. My brain immediately went to the worst-case scenario — she was scooped up by a sex trafficking ring and I would never see her again. The images that flooded my mind were too much to bear.
I still had her phone, so I logged in and tried messaging a few of her friends I knew and asked if they had seen her. All of them denied it. I passed along the message that if they did see her, to please ask her to come home. I added if she wasn’t ready to come home, to have her get in touch with me so I knew she was okay. They agreed.
The officer took a few identifying details but didn’t even bother to look at the photo of her I was attempting to show him. I distinctly got the feeling that even though he told me I did the right thing in calling, her disappearance was not an urgent matter to him. As he left, I felt completely hopeless that the people whose responsibility it was to find missing kids would make the effort to find mine.
After a few hours, I dragged myself back to the other house and paced the floor, the previous 24 hours on repeat in my head. I debated going back to my house to wait for her. I ultimately decided that knowing I wasn’t there might encourage her to come home.
The next morning, I went home to see if she had come home, but when I opened the door, my heart sank as I realized that she had not. I called the police to see if they had any information and was again treated as though my missing thirteen-year-old was no big deal. Frustrated, I started texting her friends to see if anyone knew anything. If they did, no one was giving her up.
As we reached the 24-hour mark, a friend picked me up and we started trolling the neighborhood and knocking on doors. All the friends my daughter had the prior year had distanced themselves from her when she started hanging out with the wrong crowd. While all of them expressed how much they missed her, none of them had any information on her whereabouts. I went back home feeling completely defeated and decided to stay at my house that night, willing her to come home.
On the morning of January 3, I called the police again to see if they had any leads and it was clear that no effort had been made on their end. I asked the officer if there was any possibility that she could have been so mad at me that she’d found a way to her father’s house across town. It was highly unlikely, but after explaining our tenuous coparenting situation, he offered to call and ask. I sent her father a message on our Talking Parents portal. After several hours, I called the officer back and was told he’d left a message. I realized later that likely never happened.
I had plans to meet a friend for coffee and a hike and I contemplated canceling, but I knew that at that point, I had done all I could do. It was a waiting game and I just needed to take my mind off my reality for a moment. When I told her what was going on, she provided the comfort that I so desperately needed and reassured me that my daughter would come home. I wasn’t so sure, but I felt better. I returned home, hoping there would be a sign that my daughter had come back, even for a moment. I was grasping for any sign that she was okay. Everything was as I had left it that morning.
As 48 hours passed and nothing had changed, I contacted my attorney to find out what to do. She put me in touch with a private investigator because the police continued to treat me as though my missing teenager was the least of their priorities.
I put together a post to be shared on social media and cried as I realized that I didn’t have very many recent photos of my child that didn’t have some sort of goofy Snapchat filter. I found a photo that I had taken on our trip to Mexico the previous fall and my gut cinched a little bit at the thought that I may never see my girl smile like that again. With my heart breaking, I posted the “missing” graphic to my Facebook and Instagram feeds and started to figure out how I was going to pay the $1000 retainer to the PI.
Within minutes, her phone and mine started blowing up. Acquaintances of hers wanted to know if it was real. None of them had useful information. With barely a moment between calls and texts, I looked down at the call coming in and it was her father’s neighbor. She had seen my post and was calling to ask questions. I was short with my responses and hung up quickly. A few minutes later, her father called me. I realized that the officer had never called him earlier that day, as it was a surprise to him to get this news almost twelve hours later (he wouldn’t bother to retrieve the Talking Parents message I sent until six weeks later).
Later that evening, my friend and I set out to knock on doors again. Her teenager started pinging people on Snapchat and one kid we ran into admitted that he had seen my daughter earlier that day and she seemed “pretty strung out.” Horrible images of my daughter, high and hurting, flooded my mind.
After poking around a little more, we learned who she was with. As I shared information within my circle, I had several friends who work for the school district reach out with information (that they absolutely should not have shared) about where she might be. I contacted the police again and they agreed to do a drive by of the address I was given and check to see if she was there.
Finally, my daughter reached out to me via Snapchat and insisted she was fine. I asked her to come home and she refused. My friend took me home and my neighbor sat with me while I waited anxiously.
Several hours later, my daughter came limping through the door, her leg with a large scrape on it, and she glared at me briefly before heading into her room. I broke into an uncontrollable sob that did not let up for 20 minutes. She was finally home after 53 hours.
With tears in my eyes, I finally said, “Do you have any idea what hell the past two days have been for me?” And she looked at me and said, “I don’t know why you care so much.”
My heart was filled with relief and then completely shattered. The kid that came home was not my daughter. In that moment, I didn’t recognize her at all. I could not comprehend how she could so cruelly dismiss my anguish and I just sat there, dumbfounded, waiting for the police to arrive to check her in.
She would run away twice more in the following three weeks, and each time, I prayed that my kid would come home safely. Thankfully, she did and eventually, we got through everything that was driving that behavior. But for 53 hours in the first days of 2020, I wasn’t so sure.
EUNICE BROWNLEE has spent her career finding the balance between her left and right brains. She is a passionate writer and writes regularly about mental health, trauma, and abuse. She’s also a solo mother, striving to raise a daughter who is strong and outspoken. Eunice has been published in The Kindred Voice, Motherscope and Spoken Black Girl. Eunice’s current project is a book about the trauma of navigating the justice system as a victim of a crime. When she’s not doing any of the above, she can be found seeking her next passport stamp and drinking wine. Follow her on Instagram @eunicebrownlee.