Detroit News Interview

Last Updated: July 13. 2011 10:52AM

Marney Rich Keenan

When people go missing, families turn to Missing You Foundation

Michigan nonprofit's volunteer investigator driven to help families and police

Unless you're Casey Anthony, when your child is missing, you want to get word out far and wide. You want search parties organized. And you want help with law enforcement and news media.
What you want, in essence, is a Jamie Jones.
Jones' official title is chief investigator for Missing You Foundation, a Michigan-based nonprofit that helps families of the missing find their loved ones.
But Jones , 48, of Albion really is more of a jack of all trades in the missing persons arena. He could be calming down a frantic mother one minute and organizing a search party of 75 volunteers to be on the ground on an hour's notice the next.
On Monday, Jones, who works as a restaurant and catering chef, was steeped in his most recent case — that of the missing 4-month-old Katherine "Baby Kate" Phillips of Ludington. He would not leave his home office, otherwise known as command central.
"It's an adrenaline thing," Jones said. "The first week that this happened, I hardly slept. Maybe two, three hours a night. Especially in the beginning when time is of the essence I can't walk away from this chair."
"Baby Kate" went missing June 29. Sean Michael Phillips, 21, who has been arrested on kidnapping charges, allegedly abducted the child outside the Ludington apartment where the baby lives with her mother, Ariel Courtland, and the couple's 4-year-old daughter, Haley. While Phillips refused to cooperate with authorities on the whereabouts of the infant, search groups have been combing the area daily.
Missing You Foundation was contacted by the child's family shortly after the Amber Alert was posted. Jones got right to work creating the Facebook page: "Katherine Shelbie Elizabeth Phillips — Missing in Michigan" complete with downloadable fliers for people to print and post. (In 12 days the site had more than 2.5 million hits.) He helped organize search parties, and on a 90-degree-plus day, he made sure that 30 cases of water were delivered to the volunteers.
Collaborating with the local Chamber of Commerce and radio stations, Jones also started a donation drive to raise money for a reward.
Through his close ties with notables in the field (like child advocate Marc Klaas and bounty hunter Bobby Brown), Jones pressed and got the TV host Nancy Grace to write about the "Baby Kate" case on her blog.
This is all nonpaid, straight-from-the-heart work for Jones, who first volunteered in 2007 in the search for Mary Lands of Marshall. Lands was a 39-year-old medical billing clerk who disappeared from her home under suspicious circumstances.
"It gets in your blood," Jones said. "I just really want to help bring closure to these families. You can deal with death. It's hard, but you can deal with it. It's the unknown that tears you apart."
"Jamie is amazing in that he is not classically trained but he is the best investigator I know," says Missing You Foundation founder Shannon Dingee-Kramer, 35, of Okemos. "His passion for this work is so great. He just seems to have a never-ending supply of it."
The idea for the nonprofit — which offers search and rescue resources, volunteers, dog handlers and a liaison between families, media and law enforcement — arose out of a family tragedy for Dingee-Kramer. "My mother was killed in 1997," she said. "Because there was so much mystery surrounding her death and I'd felt so powerless, I decided I wanted to give families in these horrible situations the power that I didn't have. I can't fix what happened to my mother, but I can help these families not feel so helpless."
Kramer estimates that since 2000, Missing You has helped out in hundreds of cases in Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Ohio, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia. The organization is called for help in everything from child abductions and nonparental custody disputes to Alzheimer's patients and runaways.
Integral to the success of the organization is Missing You's imperative that they work in tandem with law enforcement. "We help search for missing people; we don't solve cases," Kramer says.
As far as Baby Kate is concerned, Jamie Jones knows the longer the wait, the less likely there will be a good outcome. Still, he is undeterred. "My feeling," he says, "is that she's alive and well. And until I find otherwise, we have 100 percent hope that she is coming home. She is out there somewhere; we just have to find her."


From The Detroit News: http://detnews.com/article/20110713/OPINION03/107130364/When-people-go-missing--families-turn-to-Missing-You-Foundation#ixzz1VEeUhPpa