Ohio Missing Persons Working Group makes 18 recommendations to better investigate cases

The following article was originally published in the Ohio Capital Journal and published on News5Cleveland.com under a content-sharing agreement.

The Ohio Missing Persons Working Group has made 18 recommendations to lawmakers, the Ohio Attorney General’s Office, and various statewide agencies to better investigate missing persons cases.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine created the 24-member working group in January after The Columbus Dispatch published a series last year about how police handle missing persons cases. The group met six times and DeWine announced the recommendations Tuesday.

“We believe, from the bottom of our heart, (the recommendations) will improve the way the state of Ohio handles reports when somebody goes missing,” said Ohio Department of Public Safety Director Andy Wilson.

There were 21,342 missing Ohioans in 2024 — including 16,404 missing children, according to the Ohio Attorney General’s Office.

One of the recommendations is that lawmakers would allow law enforcement to get a search warrant to help find someone who is missing. In order to currently get a search warrant, law enforcement has to allege that a criminal act has occurred and have probable cause.

“We know for law enforcement that as much information they can get early on in an investigation will certainly help, a lot of times, bring the outcome to a speedy resolution,” Wilson said. “One of the tools that law enforcement officers use to gather that information is a search warrant for records pertaining to phone records or internet records or social media records.”

The working group is also asking lawmakers to increase penalties for crimes of interference with custody, which is currently a fifth-degree felony.

“A lot of times, missing children go missing because of a family member or a parent who doesn’t have legal custody of the child, takes that child in violation of custody orders, and sometimes takes that child out of state,” Wilson said.

In some situations, the missing child is taken out of the country, he said.

“In those situations, once you remove the child from the state, it becomes very difficult to get that child back, especially if you’re only dealing with a lower level felony offense,” Wilson said. “If you take the child out of the country, it should be enhanced even further, because then it becomes very difficult for law enforcement to get that child back. We believe that not only would that have a deterrent effect on people taking their kids and running, but it would adequately address the system from a justice point of view.”

Some of the most tragic cases DeWine has seen were custody cases where the child was taken out of the country.

“It is extremely difficult for anybody to do anything about that once that child is outside the custody of the United States,” he said. “And so anything we can do to increase that penalty, try to make that more of a deterrent, is certainly something that we should do.”

State Reps. Christine Cockley, D-Columbus, and Kevin Ritter, R-Marietta, introduced a bill that would require law enforcement agencies to enter a missing person’s information in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.

“We believe from the bottom of our heart that (the) bill is probably a good vehicle for us to maybe amend or add some of the recommendations from this working group,” Wilson said.

Andy Chapman

Andy Chapman went missing in 2006 and his family has been working to bring him home ever since.

“Nineteen years we have held out hope that Andy would come home, 19 years of worry, heartbreak, anger, sadness, and unimaginable grief,” his sister Aimee Chapman said.

Andy went missing when he was 32 years old, a few years after his life “was turned upside down” by addiction after getting in a car accident, his sister said. He was last seen in Columbus.

Aimee said her brother’s case has been closed and reopened by several detectives over the years.

“Throughout all this time, we have continued to advocate on behalf of Andy and our family and other families of missing persons,” she said. “Families are the key to that individual’s habits, friends and records. … Knowing these cases are not forgotten about is so important to us.”

18 recommendations

1. The Ohio General Assembly should codify criteria for Ohio’s Endangered Missing Child Alert.
2. The Ohio State Highway Patrol should work with the Attorney General’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation to create an automatic process to notify necessary law enforcement agencies of Endangered Missing Child Alerts. 
3. The U.S. Department of Justice should expedite work to connect National Crime Information Center to the NamUs database as required by the federal Help Find the Missing Act, otherwise known as Billy’s Law. 
4. The Ohio General Assembly should create legislation authorizing law enforcement and county prosecutors to seek search warrants to gather information and records that may help them locate a high-risk missing person. 
5. The Ohio General Assembly should create legislation to increase the criminal penalty for suspects who interfere with custody by removing a child or children out of the state or to a foreign nation
6. The Ohio General Assembly should mandate that interference with custody arrest warrants be entered into LEADS and NCIC with a nationwide pickup radius. 
7. The Ohio Office of Criminal Justice Services should expand its Ohio Prisoner Extradition Reimbursement Program to allow grant funding to be used to pay law enforcement for costs associated with returning interference with custody suspects to Ohio. 
8. The Ohio General Assembly should create legislation requiring local law enforcement agencies to digitize unresolved missing persons reports prior to the destruction of paper files. BCI should also create a digital repository to store missing persons’ case records from local law enforcement agencies. 
9. The Ohio Peace Officer Training Academy within the Ohio Attorney General’s Office should develop advanced training for new missing persons investigators and law enforcement dispatchers. 
10. The Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services and the Ohio Department of Health should develop a model policy outlining information healthcare providers are legally permitted to share with law enforcement officers investigating missing persons cases. 
11. The Ohio Attorney General’s Office should maintain a central repository of resources for law enforcement and families of missing persons. 
12. The Ohio Attorney General’s Office and Ohio Department of Public Safety should partner to create educational resources outlining how and when to file a missing persons report. 
13. BCI should establish an annual conference for law enforcement and families with missing loved ones to collaborate, share best practices, and raise awareness about missing persons cases in Ohio. 
14. BCI should establish a confidential forum for law enforcement and intelligence analysts conducting missing persons investigations to discuss techniques, establish cross-jurisdiction collaboration, and perform case reviews. 
15. The Ohio Collaborative Community-Police Advisory Board should review and revise its missing persons law enforcement standard and model policy in accordance with this working group’s recommendations. 
16. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement should implement a process to notify state refugee coordinators within the Ohio Department of Job & Family Services when an unaccompanied minor is placed in Ohio. 
17. The Ohio School Safety Center and Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles should work together to increase awareness of the ID R Kids youth identification card program. 
18. The Ohio Department of Children and Youth, Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation, and Ohio Office of Criminal Justice Services should work with local law enforcement to develop a pilot program that utilizes advocates to support at-risk youth who regularly leave their homes or group home settings.