Fearing for her daughter’s safety, Latricia Hartley alerted the authorities as soon as she noticed her 14-year-old daughter was missing. The Bayview-Hunters Point mother informed authorities in April about her daughter’s mental illness, suicidal thoughts, and social naiveté, and stated that she had reason to believe her child was lured away from home by a 16-year-old boy “with a predatory impulse and a history of self-harm who expressed a desire to kill his parents,” The San Francisco Standard reported.
She also informed them about the frightening note left by the girl, who stated that it would be too late if anyone found them. Hartley told The San Francisco Standard, “I let them know that my daughter’s life was in danger.”
Yet, the San Francisco Police Department ignored her and did not even issue an Amber Alert. The devastated mother pitched that the police issue an ebony alert, which was rolled out this year to help find “Black youth, including young women and girls, who are reported missing under unexplained or suspicious circumstances, at risk, developmentally disabled, or cognitively impaired, or who have been abducted.” But that also went unanswered, she said.
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After, Hartley decided to take matters into her own hands and went to the boy’s school to get his details. In addition, she made use of social media platforms like TikTok and other platforms to publicize her disappearance, sparking a community search that also went viral online.
After three days with no update from the police, Hartley followed a tip that the girl was holed up at the boy’s East Bay mobile home. She went to the Castro Valley address with a Bayview violence prevention worker named Raymond Whitley and she knocked violently, demanding to see her daughter.
The police arrived, but only to investigate a report that the teen boy, who is white, had made about three Black males with guns attempting to break in. Rather than recognizing Hartley as a mother frantically looking for her young child, the deputies handcuffed her and sent her and Whitley to jail on accusations of felony burglary and child abuse.
Reports state that deputies had Hartley and Whitley handcuffed minutes after they arrived. Deputies labeled Whitley an unreliable informant who provided them with “inconsistent statements” and Hartley as menacing. They categorized the boy as a victim, even though he had no injuries, and handed him over to his uncle because his father was in South America.
Shocked and disappointed, Hartley said that the police might have moved more quickly—if not stopped the kid from running away in the first place—had the girl’s school administration taken greater action.
The San Francisco Unified School District transferred the girl to a new campus after her mother mentioned her codependent attachment to the 16-year-old boy who had a history of stalking, self-mutilation, coercive control, and soliciting sexually explicit pictures and videos, according to Hartley. Hartley said she saw texts from the boy to her daughter about his desire to “groom” her, as well as pictures of his self-inflicted cuts.
Even so, the day before her daughter left home, Hartley said that school personnel observed the girl with him on a couch at the new school. But to her knowledge, no one told the boy to leave.
“My daughter is on medication and has special needs. He knew that,” she added, “He clearly had his hooks in her again. And the next day, she was gone.”
During the boy’s interview with deputies following Hartley’s arrest, he described how he had met the girl a few days prior at a Daly City McDonald’s and had taken her over the bay via BART and Muni to stay at his apartment while his father was on vacation in Colombia. He claimed the girl planned to spend at least five days with him before the end of spring vacation.
Hartley’s daughter was eventually discovered hiding beneath a bed, where she had been when deputies searched the residence earlier that morning. After several hours, her aunt came to take her up from a police station, as Hartley was scheduled to be detained for the next five days at Santa Rita Jail in Dublin. Whitley was able to walk free sooner because he had posted bail.
Hartley and Whitley’s felony charges were reduced to misdemeanors, but they claim they will fight to get them dropped entirely. Meanwhile, the two hopes police will reconsider how they respond to endangered missing children, particularly Black and Brown children.
Black people comprise just 13% of the U.S. population but they make up nearly 40% of people reported missing to the FBI, research cited by The San Francisco Standard said. Black families usually suffer to get officers to classify their loved ones as missing, with Black children likely to be treated as runaways, meaning they don’t qualify for Amber Alerts that will draw more attention to their disappearance.
Hartley expressed, “I know my daughter, and I told them I knew she was at risk. That should have been enough. Instead, it’s like, my daughter’s life was in danger, and y’all didn’t care.”
