Officials said Smith’s family was notified that she had been located and were informed about her request to keep her whereabouts undisclosed.
Wonder if she’ll be notified of their request for retroactive child support
SHEESH. Def wanted to get away. Being a parent is rough, especially if you don’t want it. Still fucked up what she did, making them wonder what happened for decades and decades and won’t even face them to deal with the fallout. Fuck.
I’m wondering what the husband was like.
He could be the guy that raised three kids while the mom dipped. And here you are just asking questions. There’s definitely nothing wrong with the parent who abdicated their responsibility no - must be that husband that’s bad.
The guy before me said what she did “was pretty fucked up”; I’m saying there are multiple sides to this story, and we know pretty much none of them. I’m saying that she stayed with him for 20+ years and there’s must’ve been a reason she left when she did.
So is the side where she abandons her 14 years old daughter with an abusive father the good one? Never the 8 years old boy.
They are suggesting that the husband could have been abusive, and that was the motivation to disappear
I know what they are suggesting. I’m calling it out. We’ve an article describing how one parent abdicated their responsibility and folks go - without additional info, as one reply says - immediately into blaming the husband.
Yeah, a good question to ask. But no way to really know how their relationship is based off of just this article.
Sounds like she got tired of it all and dipped. Especially with her telling the authorities to not reveal her location even to her family.
Without reading the article, I choose to believe she finally found the perfect Christmas gift.
“You wouldn’t believe the line I had to wait in for Tickle Me Elmo.”
How do you stay “missing” that long without being found? Like if you applied for a job / filed your tax return / got a credit card wouldn’t some system get flagged?
You dont do any of that, for one, or you do it under a fake name.
It was also probally easier 24 years than it is now. No cellphhones, no social media, very basic digital cameras, almost no survelance cameras.
Cellphones existed in 2002. They weren’t smart phones, but we had mobile cellular devices. And MySpace. That was only a few years out from Twitter and Digg being released.
Asking for a friend?
😳
This is both good and sucky for everyone. I feel for the family - glad for them to have some conclusion, but also sad for them to find out she just left.
We don’t know what the mum went on to do. Whether she just noped out and lived by herself, or even if she had another family. Many unanswered questions and all anyone is left with is more unanswered questions and more undeserved pain for this family.
All I’ll say, as a father of a couple of kids, is well done to the dad for holding them all together. I hope the mother will one day give them all the closure they deserve but I have a sneaking suspicion that all this will lead to is feelings of abandonment rather than loss.
That was a long long way to the nearest cigarette kiosk.
Did she just peace out or what?
Yes. Apparently the father suspected as much the entire time.
Her daughter, Amanda Smith, spoke to NBC News in 2020, and spoke about her father’s theory on her mother’s disappearance.
“He believes she just took off and left him, and us, that night,” Amanda said. “And I guess that’s possible. It’s hard to rule out that she just left all of us and started a new life. But there’s also something that nags at me, that something happened to her on her way back home.”
I understand wanting to leave, but it’s hard to justify not giving any sign of life. This sounds like torture.
Yes, that turns it from a mental breakdown to cruelty.
Maybe mum has more underlying issues.
I hope there’s a way for their children to relay a message to them.
the daughter had a facebook page dedicated to bringing her mom home. It is sad and difficult to read at times.
I wonder how many times the mother visited the page and just never did anything about it?
Who goes to a Kmart 17 miles away at 8:30 at night? Didn’t Kmart (and most stores in general) close by 8 or 9? Even closing at 9, if you drove 17 miles at 40 miles an hour assuming zero traffic or other issues, you’d just barely make it to the store, let alone have time to shop. Awful cover story. F-.
I expect this assignment re-written from scratch, and the rough draft peer reviewed before a final hits my desk. Due Friday, minus 10 percent for the extension.
Kmart used to close at 10 when I was in my teens. But that was 25+ years ago.
I recall as a child of the 90s and 2000s, that my local K-Mart was open 24/7. I remember this because one night my mom and I had both woken up in the middle of the night, and were watching tv struggling to fall back to sleep, so we went to K-Mart to see what it was like in the middle of the night.
With that said, I don’t know who would go to K-Mart at 8:30PM.
Back in 2001? I lived in semi-rural Maryland and our grocery stores were open till 10, or midnight if you wanted to drive to the nearest “big town”, and there was a 24-hour Walmart about 45 minutes away. I can’t speak to Kmart - there wasn’t one in my area - but I wouldn’t be surprised if her stores stayed open later as well.
Edit: also, regardless of normal store hours, this was a couple weeks before Christmas, so extended hours could definitely be in play.
I’m in a pretty large town and the only ones that were open later were Walmart, from what I recall. I don’t think we even got 24h Walmart locations until the late 2000s.
But it has been 25 years, maybe age is getting to me…
They started to convict some people with no bodies too. How embarrassing that would be if they had someone in prison, or already executed.
They would probably suppress the information if they could if that was the case. Government employees all cover for each other. Especially prosecutors, those old boys are dishonest and rotten to the core, and run unopposed more often than not.
Prosecutors got a lot more powerful in the 80s, in their campaigns during the crime wave, and the satanic panic and all that. It didn’t used to be such a powerful position as of now.
I hope they sue her into the ground, what in the actual fuck.
