On a Saturday in April, families of the missing came to the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office with binders, DNA swabs, and 30 years of questions

A middle-aged woman in thin red glasses carried two binders bursting at the seams with photos of her missing daughter. She showed picture after picture of a little girl with bright pink glasses and an even brighter smile to Chicago Police Department officers. It was when she showed the officer a photo of her holding her daughter close that she broke down into tears.

On the other side of the room, a man sat in distress while Cook County Sheriff’s officers asked him to recall specific details of his missing aunt. He called his 80-year-old mother to ask about her sister, who has been missing for more than 30 years.

Jim, who asked to be called only by his first name, ended the call with his mother and put his head down. “We just want answers on where Debby is,” he said without looking up.

Jim remembers his aunt as a woman who would always make time for the people she loved and always check in on her family. Missing since July of 1995, Jim said he saw a segment on the local news about Missing Persons Day and decided it was worth coming in to talk to law enforcement.

“My mom and uncle constantly wonder where she is and what happened to her,” Jim said. “I just want them to get the answers they deserve. It’s been long enough.”

About ten families attended the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office’s sixth Missing Persons Day event last Saturday, April 18, where a mix of medical examiner personnel, law enforcement, and the family and friends of missing people shared DNA swabs, medical records, and other information in an effort to identify missing and unidentified people.

Representatives from the medical examiner’s office, the Chicago Police Department (CPD), the Bureau of Detectives, and the Cook County Sheriff’s Office attended. The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs, also had representatives available to help families submit their loved ones’ information to the database.

Chicago’s Missing Persons Day exists because, for too many families, the system meant to find their loved ones has fallen short. Black residents, especially young Black girls, make up a disproportionate amount of missing persons cases, a disparity that has held steady for years even as overall cases have declined. Reporting from Invisible Institute and City Bureau shows how these cases can slip deeper through the cracks due to miscommunication, incomplete records, or cases closed too soon by the Chicago Police Department, such as the Linzene Franklin case.

After Franklin was reported missing, Chicago police marked her as having returned home, even though she had actually died and was buried as an unidentified person. It took nearly a decade, and a DNA match through the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office, to connect the dots. A day like this attempts to close those gaps, bringing families face-to-face with investigators and resources. It also quietly acknowledges that for many Chicagoans, being reported missing doesn’t always mean being fully searched for.

Mandy Sark, the vice chair of the Taskforce on Missing and Murdered Chicago Women, said the issue isn’t just that people are disappearing, it’s that “there’s no urgency in how those cases are handled,” a failure that compounds the risk for Black women and girls, who disproportionately go missing in Chicago.

In the 2025 Task Force on Missing and Murdered Chicago Women’s annual report, a pattern emerges: the drivers of disappearance stem from decades of disinvestment, high rates of gender-based violence, and inconsistent responses from systems meant to protect people. The report calls for changes to the Missing Persons Identification Act because agencies aren’t consistently entering cases into national databases, creating gaps that slow down searches and leave families without clear answers.

“I don’t think people really understand what leads to someone being missing,” Sark said. “It can be them fleeing from a domestic abuse situation, or someone running from foster care, or someone with dementia. There needs to be more done to understand and help people in these situations.”

Many families don’t know what steps to take when someone goes missing, said Ponni Arunkumar, the chief medical examiner for Cook County. She said the goal of the event is for families to submit any information they have in hopes they can work with law enforcement to find out what happened to their missing loved ones.

“We want to make the public aware that they can take all of the steps needed, and the process doesn’t need to be as daunting as it is,” Arunkumar said. “These families deserve closure, and we hope we can provide that for them.”

There are currently 14 unidentified bodies at the Cook County morgue, Arunkumar said, and since the 1980s, her office has been working to name unidentified people who have been buried. A Reader analysis of medical examiner data from September 1980 to the present shows that just over 80 percent of unidentified persons in Cook County are men, nearly 17 percent of cases are women, and 1.5 percent are unknown. Of those identified over the same period, half are white, 38 percent are Black, 5 percent are Latine, and 8 percent are unknown.

Antoinette Ursitti, chief of the Bureau of Detectives for CPD, said she understands the frustrations families may have with law enforcement when their loved one is missing. Ursitti said events like Missing Persons Day give families the chance to communicate with law enforcement and establish regular contact with people in her department. Law enforcement agencies want answers, too, Ursitti said, which is why they often partner to investigate missing persons cases in Cook County.

“The one thing we have in common with every agency we partner with is we want to get answers,” Ursitti said. “We believe that anybody who is missing or is unidentified and located deserves to have a name.”

Ja’Niyah McMichael has been missing since October 2024. Credit: Madison Roth

Antonio Rogers was incarcerated when his 13-year-old daughter, Ja’Niyah McMichael, went missing outside her mother’s house in Gary, Indiana, nearly two years ago. She was reported as a runaway, Rogers said, but he doesn’t believe his daughter would leave her family behind. The story he was told doesn’t add up.

“I’m just trying to find my little girl,” Rogers said. “I don’t wish this upon my worst enemy: to not know where your child is or what’s going on is the worst pain.”

Rogers had three of his seven children with him at the event and said McMichael’s siblings constantly ask him where she is and when she’s coming home. His children are the reason he keeps searching for his oldest daughter.

“Her dad loves her. I’m not giving up on finding her,” Rogers said. “I miss her like hell, and I just want my baby to come home.”

He said coming to Missing Persons Day was “like a breath of fresh air” because he felt like every person he spoke with paid attention to every detail regarding his daughter and what happened to her.

“I felt like I was alone, but having these people make sure DNA is put aside and have a genuine care about the families is revitalizing,” Rogers said.

It’s people like Rogers that motivated Cook County Sheriff’s Office commander Jason Moran to establish a close relationship with the medical examiner’s office in hopes of helping families gain closure. The advisory board he sits on came up with the idea for Missing Persons Day in 2020, he said.

Moran stressed that families should report a loved one missing immediately. He said it’s better to have as much information as possible as soon as possible, so law enforcement has the best chance of reuniting families.

“Every missing person is somebody’s person,” Moran said. “While it can be difficult to give the news if we find out somebody is deceased, we’ve found it’s better for families to know than not to.”

There are a lot of layers to a missing persons case, Moran said, and it’s important to him that law enforcement collaborate with the families and the medical examiner to bring missing people home safely.

“Having a society of lots of missing persons cases is not a healthy place,” Moran said. “We want to resolve these cases and give answers to families whenever we can.”

If someone you know is missing, Invisible Institute and City Bureau have published a guide to finding community support, using national databases, arranging your own search, and more.

On a Saturday in April, families of the missing came to the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office with binders, DNA swabs, and 30 years of questions

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