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his family, who worries that he could have become disoriented and not have known who he was or where he belonged.
    His sister, Nancy Freneire, says when they tried to report him missing, the police told them that because Carlos was between sixteen and fifty-five, there was no crime involved; thus they would not take a report.
    “My sister and mother were baffled upon learning that such a rule existed,” says Nancy.
    Nancy says that the lack of documentation has meant that the media has not taken them seriously. “Every attempt to search for my brother has been denied because we do not have a missing persons report,” she says.
    After years of battling the system, Nancy was able to get her own DNA into the national database so that it can be compared against unidentified remains. And the family continues its struggle to bring attention to their plight.
    “I know there is a light at the end of this tunnel,” she says. Until it shines on the Diaz family, they will keep searching for Carlos.
    R
    For many decades the plight of missing adults was shrugged off both by police and the legal system. In many cases, police refused to take reports because neither law nor internal police procedures compelled them to do so. Or they fell back on the old “forty-eight hour rule” (or twenty-four, depending on the jurisdiction), which, in essence, says that a person must be missing for the allotted amount of time before they’ll take a report.
    Although law enforcement acknowledges that there are problems in waiting two days to begin a missing persons investigation, many agencies still resist taking a report on a missing adult. Some of this resistance comes from tradition—there is no law preventing an adult from disappearing and not telling anyone. Other agencies have too few officers to work cases without definitive indications that the adult is either endangered or has been the victim of foul play; there is also the lack of agency policy or trained personnel to conduct these investigations.
    Although his primary focus is juvenile justice, Ron Laney, associate administrator of the Child Protection Division of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, could be speaking for all missing persons cases when he talks about how fast an agency should implement an investigation.
    “What do you mean by immediate? Start right now,” Laney said in an address during Fox Valley Technical College’s annual conference, “Responding to Missing and Unidentified Persons” (see chapter 11).
    Laney says when he hears an officer say, “Here in my jurisdiction, I don’t have any missing kids,” his response is that they’re not looking hard enough. There are kids—and adults—who go missing all of the time. Many turn up, but for some families the agony seems never-ending.
    Wayne Sheppard, associate director of training and outreach for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), says agencies and organizations must work together to improve police response. He points to the 2004 abduction and murder of eleven-year-old Carlie Bruscia as a good example of an investigation that could have gone better.
    The judicial system was second-guessed when it came to light that
the killer, Joseph P. Smith, had been cited back to court by his probation officer for a violation and freed by the courts a month prior to Carlie’s kidnapping and slaying. In the beginning, the Manatee County Sheriff’s Department decided not to issue an Amber Alert because there were no witnesses to her abduction. That move brought a thunderstorm of criticism both from the media and others who pointed out that the possible advantages of issuing an alert far outweigh the small amount of time it takes to issue one.
    Detractors also said that the department’s initial focus on the girl’s stepfather led them to ignore other possible scenarios, including stranger abduction. But in following the girl’s trail—she was walking home from a