PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Last month’s disappearance of 23-year-old Kada Scott prompted other families to post and share pictures of their missing loved ones, hoping to gain attention and traction in finding them.
Scott’s disappearance garnered national headlines after she went missing on Oct. 4. Her body was found weeks later, buried in a shallow grave behind a vacant school in Germantown.
Each year in Philadelphia, about 3,600 people go missing — roughly 10 people a day. Most are found.
“In many of these cases, these cases are closed within hours, minutes,” said Deputy Police Commissioner Frank Vanore.
Nearly 70% of those who go missing are children.
“Many of the juveniles that we get are runaways or involved in a custody dispute where one parent is reporting them missing and another is with them. In those cases, they are still missing and we investigate the incidents, but they are different,” he explained.
“We have people who suffer from dementia, Alzheimer’s, where they may walk away from their residences, don’t know where they are at. So those types of alerts have to go out, and then when we have more serious cases involving younger people, we utilize the Megan’s law feature we have through the state, where we can push that out very quickly.”
Investigators look to see if the missing person has used their phone or social media. They check with all family members, friends, schools, jobs, hospitals. More often than not, the person is found.
“When we think the person is involuntarily missing, endangered in some way, we may call a press conference to do something more serious,” he said.
In Scott’s case, investigators knew from the get-go something was amiss: She hadn’t used her phone, and a co-worker said they saw her get in a car with someone outside her job in Mount Airy.