34 replies to this topic

[Kelly]

Susan Ryan and Erin Pospisil are Project Jason's featured missing persons for August of 2010. Their photos and case information, with links to their news and information threads, is on the main page of the Project Jason website. This is one means of awareness for them, and with a high average of daily hits to the site, we'll reach many with their stories.

If your missing loved one is not registered with us for services, please click here: http://www.projectja...rg/report.shtml

[Kelly]

http://journalstar.c...13eb7fb02d.html

Cindy Lange-Kubick: In search of the missing -- and a long-lost sister


Tuesday, November 1, 2011 9:00 am

Tips still trickle in about the missing Lincoln woman, all of them dead ends as far as her sister knows.

It's why Jannel Rap keeps coming back every autumn, just about this time. Just about the time her sister, Gina Bos -- a dark-haired, petite, guitar-slinging mom -- disappeared outside Duggan's Pub at closing time.

Jannel -- a blond-headed, petite, guitar-slinging mom -- spent those first few years numb and searching, using her music to shine a light on her musician sister who played and sang that Sunday night, Oct. 17, 2000, put her guitar in her trunk and, before she could latch it shut, vanished.

That first helpless year, Jannel started hosting something she called Gina Concerts. Five years later, she kicked off The Squeaky Wheel Tour, touring towns across the country with one goal: Find the missing.

"It's been 11 years for me," Jannel said Friday from her home in Southern California. "I know people who are new to this and people who have 30 years missing their loved ones."

She'll be in town Tuesday, playing with her youngest son at Dietze Music's downtown store. Local musicians are invited to join them.

In Lincoln, as they do wherever they land and set up to play, fliers will be offered to those who walk in the door. Each gig is personalized, bringing awareness to cases in each state, or those nearby.

At Dietze: Jason Jolkowski, Erin Pospisil, Jesse Ross, Gina Marie Bos.

Most of them cases gone dormant.

Read more: http://journalstar.c...l#ixzz1camO4WRT

[Lori Davis]

Age progressed to 23 years of age

[Lori Davis]

Today marks 11 years since Erin disappeared.  Our thoughts and prayers are with her family, friends and loved ones.

[Shannon]

http://www.kcrg.com/...l?m=y&smobile=y

Website Helps Distribute Missing Persons Information Online

Story Updated: Jul 17, 2012

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa - Two Evansdale girls are the latest added to a long list of missing persons across the nation. The state of Iowa keeps a database of missing persons and you can find that information online.

An annual report in 2011 shows more than 5,000 missing persons were reported last year in the state. Those numbers includes amber alerts, operation quickfinds, and even people who were later found.

The longer someone has been missing, the less likely they'll be found. 99% of all missing kids in Iowa last year fall under an unspecified category. That means they're either a runaway or investigators simply don't know what happened to them.

“Your evidence trail starts to diminish the longer that you wait,” said Linn County Sheriff Brian Gardner.

Initially investigators can use an Amber Alert if they have a specific vehicle description and suspect description. They can issue an Operation Quickfind, but that's only useful hours after a child's been missing. Or they end up here, an online database easily found under a simple Google search that shows the faces of the Iowa children still missing.

Like Erin Pospisil, 15, who got into a friend's van in 2001 and was never seen again. Each year her family gathers for a balloon release to remember Erin. Her stepmother once shared her hopes with KCRG back in 2009.

"You think, every year, this will get easier. Every year, Christmas will get easier or birthdays will get easier. This day will get easier. It doesn't,” said Erin Pospisil’s stepmother Carolyn Pospisil.

It's the emotion from families Linn County Sheriff Brian Gardner says investigators share, and that's why they continue looking.

"We never really close a case. There may just be that we've exhausted the leads that we have. And there's no way to take it forward at this point in time,” said Gardner.

[Lori Davis]

http://www.kcrg.com/...=y&smobile=y&c=

A Look At Other Cases of MIssing Iowa Children

Story Updated: Jul 18, 2012

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa - Incidents of missing minors, not counting runaways, generate a barrage of media attention locally and nationally. While that can help locate a child, it can also create a lot of fear ... make it seem as though this is common.

Elizabeth and Lyric are the eleventh and twelfth unsolved Iowa cases on the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children Database.

These are the other ten:

-The oldest open missing child case in Iowa dates back to 1975 Colleen Simpson disappeared from her Bedford home overnight when she was 14, today she would be 51.

-Kimberly Doss is on the Iowa database, but she was actually living in Houston, Texas. She was last seen at a Greyhound bus station in Davenport in 1982.

-The most famous Iowa case, Johnny Gosch, who vanished while on his paper route in Des Moines in 1982.

-A couple years later, a similar situation when Eugene Martin's newspaper bag was found outside Des Moines, but he was never seen again.

-In 1986 Marc Allen was walking to a friend's house in Des Moines but never arrived, he was 13.

-Erin Pospisil was 15 when she got into a car in downtown Cedar Rapids on June 3, 2001 and no one has seen or heard from her since.

-Authorities believe Kyanja Vanwey ran away from Des Moines in 2005, she would be 21 today.

-Benjamin Roseland was 19 when he was last seen leaving a friend's house to go to the grocery store in Clinton in 2008. He's considered missing, but not endangered or abducted.

-Katelyn Coulter is 15 and authorities believe she ran away from Muscatine in May.


In 2011, there were 4,593 reports of missing children in Iowa. According to the Iowa Department of Public Safety, 99.2% of those were runaways.

[Kelly]

http://whotv.com/201...pe-12-years-on/

MISSING GIRL: Parents’ Hope 12 Years On

Posted on: 10:28 pm, May 25, 2013, by Sam Hoyle

The search for missing Dayton teen, Kathlynn Shepard is bringing back painful memories for one set of parents in eastern Iowa.

Erin Pospisil was also 15-years old when she disappeared in 2001 in Cedar Rapids. She went to a friend’s house to watch movies, but the friend wasn’t home.

Erin hasn’t been seen since.

Her family and friends were going to release balloons or lanterns to remember Erin, Saturday. Because of the rainy weather, they’ll take them home and release them at a later time.

Despite more than a decade passing, the family still holds out hope their daughter will be found.

“We still hope that she’s out there somewhere,” says dad, Jim.

balloonsMom, Carolyn won’t give up until she is found, “We still want to know what happened but at the same time we still have hope that we’ll find her. When you have stories like what happened in Ohio where three girls are found 10 years, 9 years later, and so it does bring back some hope that we’ll bring her home as well.”

Saturday is National Missing Children’s Day. It is held each year on May 25th and has been observed each year since 1983.

[Kelly]

http://www.kwwl.com/.../family-still-h

Family still hoping to find their daughter who's been missing more than a decade

Posted: May 25, 2013 1:40 PM PDT Updated: May 25, 2013 4:51 PM PDT
Written by Michelle Corless, Multimedia Journalist

CEDAR RAPIDS (KWWL) -

Rain and cold weather didn't stop Erin Pospisil's family and friends from coming together in Cedar Rapids Saturday.

"We also do it so that people can remember and also gives us all a chance to come together at the same time and honor her," said Carolyn Pospisil, Erin's Mother.

This is the tenth year people have gathered to honor Erin. The group releases balloons or lanterns to remember the girl who was 15 years old when she went missing on June 3, 2001, a day that is still vivid in her parents' memories.

"You don't forget," said Jim Pospisil, Erin's father,

Erin went to a friend's house to watch movies but the friend wasn't home.

"The gentleman that give her the ride said that she came down and talked to some people that pulled up," said Carolyn. "She'd get a ride home with them and no one ever brought her home."

Despite more than a decade passing, the family still holds out hope their daughter will be found.

"We still hope that she's out there somewhere," said Jim.

"We still want to know what happened but at the same time we still have hope that we'll find her.," said Carolyn. "When you have stories like what happened in Ohio where three girls are found ten years, nine years later, and so it does bring back some hope that we'll bring her home as well."

It's not just their own daughter the Pospisils want to find. Saturday was National Missing Children's day.

"My wife said there's over 10,000 per year that come up missing," said Jim. "We're just trying to get the word out there."

"That's who we want to honor today and to have the hope that they, too, will be able to come home," said Carolyn.

As the group gathers they hope Erin's memory, and her story, will never be washed away.

[Kelly]

http://www.desmoines...&nclick_check=1

Parents describe struggle for police aid after daughter disappears in 2001

Aug. 17, 2013 10:29 PM


For the family of Erin Pospisil, frustration over the police response to her disappearance has simmered for more than 12 years.

Erin was 15 in June 2001 when she disappeared from a residential street in Cedar Rapids. A kid from the neighborhood had given her a ride to a friend’s house, where she planned to spend the evening watching movies.

But her friend wasn’t home when she arrived — it was later learned she’d run out to grab snacks.

Instead of returning home, according to the boy who had driven her, Erin hopped into another car, a Chevrolet Cavalier with tinted windows that had driven up from the wrong direction on the one-way street.

She hasn’t been seen since.

She disappeared on a Sunday, and her parents reported her missing the following Tuesday, her stepmother, Carolyn Pospisil, said in an interview. From the start, Cedar Rapids police were unhelpful, her stepmother said.

The department categorized Erin as a runaway and committed few resources to finding her, even as her parents contended that her case bore no resemblance to a typical runaway case.

Erin was happy and had big plans for the summer, her stepmother said. She faced none of the family crises that typically compel a teen to run. The police, however, saw what they wanted to see, and seemed to focus much of their investigation on finding facts to back up the conclusion they’d already drawn, Carolyn Pospisil said.

“Honestly, they created crisis,” she said. “The police department found things to justify why they termed her as a runaway.”

It took 10 days for the family to get a meeting with a detective, she said, and that was only after Carolyn Pospisil sat in the department lobby for six hours, refusing to leave until she spoke to someone.

The family — Erin’s father, stepmother and three siblings — led the charge themselves. They plastered Cedar Rapids with fliers, and after about a month linked up with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The organization assigned a case manager and provided resources for getting Erin’s face onto billboards and into the mass mailers distributed across the country.

With the national center’s help, the family has generated three computerized age-progression photos of Erin over the years.

The Cedar Rapids Police Department views its investigative efforts quite differently, however.

Lt. Craig Furnish, of the department’s investigative division, emphasized that the case remains open and is subject to regular reviews.

He said it was “not true” that police concluded Erin was a runaway and gave her case less attention as a result.

“I know it initially came in as a runaway report,” he said. “But then as a case evolves and a runaway does not return, then you change your tactics or strategies in investigating, and look at all angles surrounding the disappearance.”

Furnish said he could not comment on the current status of the case or the department’s operating theories for what happened to Erin, calling such details “protected investigative information.”

Carolyn Pospisil said the last time she heard from the department was June 2011, when an investigator sent an email saying he would call her.

He never did. She said the department was in contact with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children about nine months ago, although she’s unsure of the substance of that interaction.

Twelve years after the disappearance, Carolyn Pospisil maintains a determined agnosticism about what happened to her stepdaughter. She imagines Erin happily living somewhere with two kids and a dog, even as she acknowledges a more likely scenario involves her being trafficked to Chicago or St. Louis or elsewhere.

As she and her husband pressed law enforcement to act, she said, they were constantly asked what they wanted from the police.

“I just wanted them to do what I thought was their job,” she said. “I actually had the (Cedar Rapids) safety commissioner flat-out ask me, ‘What do you people expect us to do?’ My flat-out answer is, ‘I want you to look for my kid.’ ”

[Kelly]

From the family:

 

The family of missing Cedar Rapids child, Erin Pospisil, invites the community to join them in a balloon release remembering the 14th anniversary of Erin’s disappearance.

 

June 3, 2015 marks fourteen years since then 15 year old, Erin Pospisil was last seen in front of the home of a friend in the 1500 block of Second Avenue SE. Family and friends will mark the anniversary with a balloon release Saturday, June 6 at 7:00 PM at Jones Park Lagoon Pavilion, 201 Wilson Avenue Dr SW, Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52404.

All in the community are welcome to attend the balloon release remembrance.