Missing Girl Finds Herself Back Home
It was attached to a candy dispenser on the counter at a Citgo station at Blue Mound Road and Glenview Ave. where I sometimes go.
What struck me is that this particular missing child, Amanda Coon, had a birthday of May 15, 1990. She was becoming a missing adult that very week. Would the search go on?
It said Amanda was last seen at her father's house in Neenah on Nov. 25, 2006, when she was 16. She was believed to be traveling with a man and could be in Madison or Mexico.
As a father myself, I can't imagine the fear of having a child out there somewhere unknown for months on end. I decided to call the number for Menasha police on the poster and ask about Amanda.Stingl
"She's back," investigator David Jagla said. "She's been back a couple of months. She came back with her child."
Amanda picked up the phone when I called her mother's house in Menasha. It was a relief to hear the voice of someone whose sweet face I first encountered on a missing poster. You know these stories sometimes don't end well.
"I just went away with my boyfriend," she said. "I went willingly. We just wanted to get out of here. To get away."
They drove to Mexico, where the 23-year-old boyfriend was from. Amanda called her mother, Theresa Schroeder, on Christmas of 2006, but wouldn't say where she was. A few months later, she sent her mother a text message that police traced to Mexico, specifically Chimalhuacan, a city of half a million people. Attempts to get her home hit dead ends.
Theresa reported her daughter as a missing person and made up movie posters.
"I had her friends post them around here. I rode around with them on my car. I had a spotlight on the front of my house with posters in the windows," the mother said.
Theresa felt - and still feels - the police, FBI and news media didn't do enough to help her. Amanda was essentially a runaway.
Amanda had a baby boy, Carlos, in Mexico three months ago. She wasn't getting along so well with the boyfriend, and she looked around and figured this wasn't the best place to raise a child.
So she packed up her things and her baby and traveled to the U.S. Embassy. She lived in a hotel near the embassy for a few days while getting her paperwork in order, then flew to California and on to Chicago where her mother picked her up.
"That was a year and a half of hell for me," Theresa said. Now finally she had her daughter back. The first thing she did was get her re-enrolled in high school.
Amanda understands she hurt those who love her, but she's not sorry she took off.
"I'm not. It was a very good learning experience. And I have my baby now," she said.
Police tell me the boyfriend could face charges of interfering with child custody. That's if they can find him.
I returned to the gas station and pointed to Amanda's poster. It's true she was once was lost, I told them, but now she's found.
May 18, 2008
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