More than 1,000 children have been reported missing around Cleveland, Ohio, this year, including nearly 50 minors who have seemingly disappeared from the same area so far this month.
According to the Ohio Attorney General’s Office’s missing children website, a total of 1,072 children have been reported missing so far in 2023 from the Cleveland-Akron area.
That includes more than 45 children reported missing from the Cleveland-Akron area in September so far.
In the month of August, more than 35 minors were reported missing from the same Cleveland-Akron area.
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“Yes, of course, we are worried about that,” Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost told News 5 Cleveland in an interview Monday. “Now, what we know is when we look behind the numbers, some of those represent repeated runaways and local police have talked about that.”
“All of these things have localized reporting problems that again are a function of local conditions,” Yost said. “We do our best to encourage compliance and improve assistance to remove barriers, but at the end of the day, we have to rely on our local partners that we don’t control.”
“I am fearful of all kinds of things that fall through the cracks that include missing children,” the attorney general added. “I rely on the tenacity of a worried parent more than I do a harried bureaucrat whose job it is to put data into a computer.”
Yost said the state is now working with the University of Toledo to create an improved statewide data collection and reporting system. For now, the attorney general said reporting deficiencies and even search efforts are impacted by what News 4 worded as “under-resourced law enforcement.”
“Law enforcement can’t be everywhere and can’t see everything,” Yost said. “We rely on the people, the population because we have 11.7 million pairs of eyes out there that can keep an eye out.”
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Nearly 30 children were reported missing in the Cleveland area in the first two weeks of May, and Newburgh Heights Police Chief John Majoy, who also serves as the board president of the volunteer nonprofit Cleveland Missing, told Fox News Digital then that the number of 12- to 17-year-olds reported missing had remained at unprecedented levels throughout the month.
“For some reason, in 2023, we’ve seen a lot more than we normally see, which is troubling in part because we don’t know what’s going on with some of these kids, whether they’re being trafficked or whether they’re involved in gang activity or drugs,” Majoy told Fox News Digital in early June, describing the number of missing children in the area as something he had not seen in his 33-year career. “There’s always peaks and valleys with missing persons, but this year it seems like an extraordinary year.”
A group of Cleveland Missing volunteers gathered in Slavic Village, Ohio, Saturday to search for 15-year-old Keshaun Williams, who has been missing for more than 90 days.
Williams vanished from a house party on June 17, Cleveland police said.
“There’s just not enough police officers in the streets to do this as law enforcement,” Majoy told News 5 then. “The public is our greatest asset. We can’t do this without the public.”
The missing teen’s grandmother, Mary Williams, told News 5 she feels concern about her grandson’s whereabouts is being ignored. “If it’s beyond that and something unthinkable has happened, I know that God is there,” she said. “God is with him, and he’s protected and wherever he is, God is, I know that.”
Fox News’ Chris Eberhart contributed to this report.
