When a teenage black girl from Chicago and two young white women from the suburbs all mysteriously vanished, would race be a consideration in the investigation and news coverage?Yesterday, I attended a prayer vigil on behalf of a missing 15 year-old girl from Chicago's West Side, Yasmin Acree. It seems that Yasmin, the cousin of my dear friend, Rev. Ira J. Acree, has been missing for 6 months with no plausible explanations or police discoveries and no closure for family and friends.
I remember when she vanished from her home back in January '08. I'd heard about it on television and from the neighborhood grapevine. In fact, the newspaper I write for, the Windy City Word, ran her picture for about 3 weeks immediately following her disappearance.
Subsequently, when we heard nothing more about the investigation from electronic or mainstream press, I fugured she had been found or simply returned home.
Imagine my surprise when I received an email from Rev. Acree announcing the prayer vigil and the fact that Yasmin was still missing. As a member of the media I found his fact to be very disheartening in lieu of the very high-profile coverage given to two young women, Lisa Stebic and Stacy Peterson, suburbanites who have been missing for over a year, but whose stories remain fresh in the public's minds due to print and electronic news coverage.
My analytical mind tends to speculate the reasons why these cases have been handled so differently. Race.
Yasmin is a black girl from an inner-city community. Lisa and Stacy are young white women--wives and mothers who lived middle, class suburban lives. Yasmin is described as a basically good student and responsible teen who had no prior history of running away from home, who attended church regularly and who liked to hang out at the the YMCA; Lisa and Stacy were adults who were both admittedly involved in troubled marriages and who had both confided to their family and friends prior to their disappearances, that if anything were to happen to either of them that they should look to each of their husbands as suspects.
Lisa Stebic, who disappeared first, seems to have vanished into thin air. After numerous searches by family, friends, and strangers (and plenty of media coverage) there has not been a trace of her whereabouts. Her family continues to hope even after a year and a half that she is still alive.
Stacy Peterson vanished shortly after Lisa amid very suspicious circumstances. Relatives, friends, and even her pastor believe strongly that her husband might be responsible for her disappearance or at least knows more than he is telling. The husband, a police officer, maintains that Stacy has left he and their children and run off with another man. Her family says this scenario would be totally out of character.
As a part of her disappearance investigation the police exhumed the body of Stacy's husband's deceased former wife and autopsied her again. They reclassified her death from an accident to a homicide with her husband as a prime suspect. This woman's family maintained at the time of her death that it was not an accident but an orchestrated murder set up by this same husband.
The local police agencies have spared no expense in searching for these two young women.
Yasmin Acree is believed to be alive. has not received even a small portion of the high profile news coverage that these two women have commanded even though she is an underage minor and could not possibly be taking care of herself independently. Rev Acree maintains that the investigation into his cousin's disappearance is not yielding any results from the police detectives. All persons who may have seen her on the last day before she vanished have not been interviewed and thoroughly ruled out, including the former boyfriend of the young lady's mother.
Those folks watching closely include concerned clergy, family and friends, who feel that there appears to be some indifference on behalf of the Chicago Police Department in solving and closing this case. Could it be that race is playing a part in how this investigation is handled?
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