Hello America, this is www.lobbyistsofficesofgrw.com do you remember baby Jada Justice (two year old) of Portage, Indiana the baby who has has been missing now for nearly two years now. But you wouldn’t know it from watching national television news shows.
The child, a black toddler, was last seen on a Tuesday, back in 2009, when her cousin said she left the child alone in a car at a Gary, Indiana, convenience store while she went inside.
Justice is now listed on the Web site for the Center for Missing and Exploited Children and on the “America’s Most Wanted” Web site. Television stations, radio stations and newspapers around Gary and Chicago have followed the story and shown photos of Justice with numbers to call to alert authorities if she is spotted.
But unlike the recent cases of Kaylee Anthony of Orange County, Florida and Haleigh Cummings of Satsuma, Florida, the search for Jada has not received the same kind of national attention.
“Unfortunately, in cases like this, it’s not until someone writes about the fact that there is no national attention that they start doing stories,” said Eric Deggans, media and television critic at the St. Petersburg Times.
Gary, Indiana is technically part of the Chicago media market, which is actually larger than the markets where others have lived whose cases of either abduction or exploitation were featured prominently on national television, Deggans said. Major networks often pick up stories from their affiliates in those markets and develop national stories.
“If there were reporters who cared about this, they could be all over it,” Deggans told BlackAmericaWeb.com.
Yanick Rice Lamb, associate professor at Howard University and editorial director for Heart & Soul magazine, said missing children cases are something that people care about, regardless of color.
“People are concerned about their children and their children’s safety. This is something people can relate to,” Lamb told BlackAmericaWeb.com.
There are a couple of factors that can go into a decision on whether or not to give a story national news coverage, she said.
“Who are the decision makers? How great is the public outcry? The squeaky wheel gets the grease,” she said.
Also, more than 40 years after the Kerner Commission Report pointed to the impact of a lack of newsroom diversity on coverage in urban communities, there still are issues in our nation’s newsrooms, Lamb said.
While the case has not received lots of national attention, Gary Police Commander Anthony Titus said he is getting strong support from local and federal law enforcement agencies.
Representatives from the FBI, U.S. attorney’s office and local district attorney’s office met Monday to discuss the search and investigation, Titus said Monday evening.
“We have some work going on tonight, and if they don’t turn up anything, we’ll be back out in the morning,” Titus told BlackAmericaWeb.com.
“Our goal is to get Jada back home and to see if there is anything criminal involved in her disappearance,” he said.
Angelica Castillo, 18, told police Jada was missing when she returned to the car after buying a gallon of milk.
Family members said they are suspicious about the way Castillo told authorities the child went missing.
Melissa Swiontek, Justice’s mother, said, “I don’t know. I don’t know what to feel. I don’t know. I feel there are so many speculations, there’s so many things. I feel like I’m going to find her. I mean, I do feel like she can’t be gone … like this is not even happening.”
Titus said the search for Jada has been ongoing. “Anytime we’re out, we’ve got helicopters. We’ve got bodies on the ground,” he said.
Interviews and pictures have been posted on YouTube.com, and the Center for Missing and Exploited Children has developed fliers that family members and friends have been distributing in the Gary area.
