Murky Waters
"Then it’s IO:30 and I’m trying to tell some police person to forget their rule about waiting 24 hours to file a missing persons report, says Pearlie. It was, at first, a losing argument. "Here’s a fact," Pearlie told the Juvenile Aid Division officer. "It ain’t in them boys’ character not to come home when they supposed to. They’re missing." The missing persons requirement, she says now, "sucks.’"
The neighborhood quickly mounted its own search. Mama, Justin Bovell said to his mother, Christine, around II:30. They’re missing.Christine pulled a gas lantern from a closet. Justin ran to collect others from neighbors. "A dozen of us, we got the lamps, and Bugga and Rocky" -Kenny’s chow and Dontel’s romveiler-"and went looking." The search covered the whole neighborhood, eventually winding up at the Schuylkill. The parents and children combed the banks well into the morning hours, into bushes with the lamps, calling Kenyatta Ruffin! Jamie Ford! Sean Ellison! Dontel Johnson!, their voices spread thin in the great emptiness of the waterfront. Around midnight, Pearlie’s brother, James Weston, led a group across the field next to the abandoned Mercy Douglas Hospital at 50th and Woodland-one of the boys’ favorite haunts. He watched his own breath uncurling in the cool autumn air and wondered if the boys, wherever they were, were dressed for the chill.
At 38 minutes after midnight, Inspector Joseph O’Connor of Southwest Detectives threw out the 24-hour requirement and ordered that the boys be reported missing. He considered the oddity of the number-four-a red flag. Still, the investigation didn’t really start. When the Juvenile Aid officer on duty tried to enter the children into the computer system, which would have electronically spread the word not only in Philadelphia but nationally, the screen blanked. The system had been shut down for maintenance. The boys weren’t "entered" until 8 o’clock in the morning.
By then, Chanel Ruffin had collected a photograph of each boy. Willie Mae’s most recent of Sean was from a family reunion the previous summer-pictures were expensive. Soon the machines at the nearest Kinko’s were spitting out flyers: Kenyatta Ruffin. Jamie Ford. Sean Ellison. Dontel Johnson. Missing. Within hours, word had spread. Some people had seen one or two of the four boys that day. Some had seen them as a group. People remembered things-the color of Kenny’s pants: banana yellow. This was a community in which people observed and absorbed, where there was no anonymity. Suddenly the missing children were no longer of their families; they were of the community. They belonged to everyone.
By early morning, the four faces, printed on pink and yellow paper to convey the sense of emergency, were posted every-where. There was Sean-"Beaver," as he was known around the neighborhood-smiling out from a telephone pole, Kenny peering out from a bank window, Jamie and Dontel beaming in the post office, the supermarket, the laundromat. The boys, replicated thousands of times, were both nowhere and everywhere. To Chanel and those she was directing, the act of photocopying and wheat-pasting, again and again, felt like more than a wish. It seemed to hold the promise of a conjuring, as if there were a critical number-500 flyers, 1,000, 2,000-that when reached would deliver the live and whole. "After a while, everywhere you looked, there they were," she says. "It was like they were talking to you, smiling and winking and all.
