DALLAS — It’s been more than two years since fliers plastered with Kena McDonald’s granddaughter’s face were posted throughout Downtown Dallas, shared to social media platforms and broadcasted on WFAA.
It’s been more than two years since she got the frantic call from her daughter that the 15-year-old girl was missing.
It’s been more than two years, but Kena McDonald still gets choked up talking about it.
WFAA decided not to name the child because of her age and the nature of what happened to her.
“[Her granddaughter] had never even spoken of running away and never displayed any emotion as if she didn’t want to be home,” McDonald said. “This was the very first time.”
It was April 27, 2022.
McDonald said her granddaughter had gotten in trouble at school, and her mother let her know that she would face consequences when she got home.
“[Her mother] had left to go grab something to eat. When she came back, [she] had packed a backpack and left a little note saying that she was running away because she was tired of getting in trouble,” McDonald said.
McDonald said she later learned her granddaughter had barely made it out of the Downtown Dallas apartment building when she was taken.
She wouldn’t see or hear from her again until the teen wandered into a police substation in Arlington, 24 days later.
McDonald says she escaped.
She’s thankful that her granddaughter is safe. She’s in therapy, and she’s healing.
But more than two years later, Kena McDonald is still haunted by the way her granddaughter’s case was handled by Dallas Police.
“She’s just another runaway”
When McDonald’s family reported the girl missing to the Dallas Police Department, they were told she was classified as a “runaway”.
“It was very dismissive,” Kena McDonald said. “It was ‘She’s just another runaway. She’ll come back. I mean, most runaways come back’.”
She said her family knew that wasn’t the full story.
“She’s not knowledgeable enough to run away and survive. She likes nice things, and she likes to eat. She likes comfort. She’s not going to leave the house. This is not typical. She would not do this. We knew something was wrong,” McDonald said.
McDonald said she and her family did not feel like the DPD officers they interacted with listened to their concerns. She said every time they sent a tip or asked what they should do, they were told to “sit and wait”.
“I was sad because I expected more from them,” McDonald said. “Seeing missing kids on TV and experiencing it yourself and having to deal with the police department is a totally different ball game. We were the ones doing all the calling, and most of the time we were going to voicemail so we had to physically get out of our comfort zone and go down to the police department if we wanted to talk to them. They wouldn’t even call us back.”
Two weeks after McDonald’s granddaughter was reported missing, Dallas Police upgraded her case from a “runaway” case to a “critical missing child” case because her family informed police that she had a health condition that required her to take medication she didn’t have access to while she was missing.
At that point, after two weeks, DPD posted a photo and description of the teen to the department’s blog. McDonald said, before then, the department hadn’t even asked for a photo of her.
The family made their own fliers, held their own community search events and contacted WFAA on their own for coverage to spread awareness.
“My daughter was out by herself. She would get up while everybody was asleep at three and four o’clock in the morning and walk through downtown by herself to pass out fliers,” McDonald said. “She had two other children that needed her.”
The family received multiple tips from people who said they had seen the missing girl in Downtown Dallas and South Dallas, including a tip from a woman who said she had seen her with multiple adult men at her apartment building downtown.
“The detective never showed up one time,” McDonald said. “This what they said…they have too many cases to focus on one.”
WFAA met the girl’s mother and the family’s victim advocate at the hospital the day she was recovered.
“She was forced into a lot of things that she should not have had to endure,” the teen’s mother, Brendetta McDonald, said that day.
Kena McDonald said her granddaughter was sex trafficked.
DPD would only confirm that detectives from the department’s Crimes Against Children unit responded to the Arlington Police substation in late May 2022.
More than two years later, DPD has made no arrests in the case and have no updates other than she was found.
Dallas Police wrote on its blog that officers “conducted an extensive search for the missing child and interviewed numerous witnesses”.
Kena McDonald said that is not what the family witnessed.
“The system is broken,” she said. “It is messed up. When they designed it, I don’t think they had different kinds of things in mind.”
The “Runaway” Label
Texas law defines any child between the ages of 10 and 16 who voluntarily leaves home as a child who has “run away”.
The portion of Texas law that addresses missing child cases defines a “missing child” as any child under the age of 18 whose whereabouts are unknown, including children who were determined to leave voluntarily. The law doesn’t include any separation for handling cases based on how the child went missing.
However, many law enforcement agencies across North Texas have used the portion of law that defines a child who has run away from home to create separate protocol for cases involving children they deem “runaways” that are typically lower priority than higher priority missing child cases.
DPD is one of those departments.
Assistant Chief Catrina Shead, who oversees the department’s Investigations Bureau, agreed to speak with WFAA in general terms about the department’s processes for investigating missing child cases but couldn’t comment on specific cases.
“When a child becomes a critical missing, it is very important that we find the child as quickly as possible, so we actually are actively involved and actually driving around and doing a lot of the field work that we probably wouldn’t do on a missing child,” Shead said.
When asked how cases of missing children who aren’t deemed “critical” are investigated, Shead described it as an ongoing cycle of checking back on the original report and checking for new leads.
“A lot of times on a missing child, a missing child has voluntarily left and there is some informational intel on where the child could be and we just kind of go where the child could be…locations where they kind of hang out and things of that nature,” Shead said.
If the child is still not found, Shead said they “constantly redo” the steps.
“It’s not dropped, but it’s not escalated to the next level because it only escalates to the next level if we get additional intel that tells us we need to escalate to the next level,” Shead said.
According to DPD, the department considers upgrading a missing child to “High Risk Missing” if they’ve run away frequently in the past or if they’ve been missing for 30 days.
The “high risk” status has a few more steps than a standard missing child case, but still has substantially fewer steps than a critical missing child according to the department’s policy.
McDonald said 30 days is too long to wait to upgrade a missing child’s status.
“It don’t take 30 days to get across the country…30 days is entirely too long,” she said.
Shead said she understands parents’ frustration.
“Every missing child is too many for us as a department,” Shead said. “We have always worked aggressively on every missing child case, and every case is important to us.”
The McDonalds question the department’s definition of “aggressively."
“Even when they found out it was critical, nothing changed,” McDonald said. They just put it as a critical status. On their end, they didn’t do anything different. We were still out looking.”
Other North Texas “Runaway” Cases
McDonald’s granddaughter’s case mirrors others in North Texas over the past two years.
In April 2022, a 15-year-old girl left a Dallas Mavericks basketball game and was recovered 11 days later from a sex trafficking ring in Oklahoma City. When her father reported her missing to an officer at the game, he was told he had to report her as a runaway to the department in the city where they lived, 30 miles away. Should we name her?
In June 2023, a 16-year-old was reported missing in Denton. Police posted to Facebook that she left voluntarily, the girl’s parents had to reach out to WFAA on their own to spread further awareness that she was missing. She was found 46 days later in Indiana.
On February 22, a 15-year-old in the Lake Highlands area never returned home from school. Her mother said she was told her daughter was a runaway when she reported her missing to Dallas Police, despite the change in department policy, and said she leaned on her community to create fliers without much communication from police. The girl was discovered by police in Phoenix, Arizona more than 40 days later.
In July 2023, and 11-year-old girl was recovered from a sex trafficking ring in Dallas 26 days after she was reported missing in Waxahachie. An Amber Alert was issued for her disappearance but only after she’d been missing for more than 25 days as a reported runaway.
The numbers
According to data from the Texas Department of Public Safety, since 2018, an average of 9,050 children are reported missing every year in Collin, Dallas, Denton, Ellis, Hunt, Hood, Kaufman, Johnson, Parker, Rockwall, Somervell, Tarrant and Wise Counties.
Most of those cases are not treated as high priority cases, and there aren’t standard protocols for escalating cases of children who don’t return home after a short period of time.
Nationally, the FBI has received an average of 359,000 reports of missing children every year for the past few years. The agency classifies those missing children separately from children who are missing and considered to be endangered. Many argue that the mere fact that a child is missing should be caused to consider them to endangered.
The 359,000 missing children, defined as voluntarily missing juveniles who are under 18, make up more than 63 percent of all of the missing person cases, including missing adult cases, reported to the FBI.
When departments across the country send their data to the FBI, they have the option to include how they coded the case. About 48 percent choose to include that information. Of the cases that are sent with code information, more than 95% of them are coded with the “runaway” label.
“Just because a child runs away doesn’t mean they’re a ‘runaway’,” Kena McDonald said. “Make it a priority."
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