When someone you love disappears, you expect fear. But what you don’t expect is silence. You don’t expect that they are reluctant to take a report. You don’t expect to become the only person searching for your adult child.
She learned he was at the end of a very long line of missing persons – 20,000! It dashed her hopes that they would go looking for him.
That’s what happened to Dr. Arnita Fowler in 1995 when her son, LaMont Dottin—a bright, 21-year-old freshman at Queens College—didn’t come home. She went to the NYPD to report him missing. She found the office to be “in chaos” and quite indifferent to her worry. Officers “told”promised” her he’d return, and since he was an adult there was little they could do.
She was not deterred.
With no help from police, Dr. Fowler became a one-woman search party. She filed press releases, searched shelters, hired a private investigator, spoke on radio shows, canvassed homeless shelters and never stopped asking questions.
One day she returned in person to the police station and found that her son’s photo had been removed from the Missing Person’s Board. How could it be an active case if he was forgotten?
The years passed. But not her determination.
Four years later, she discovered the unthinkable: LaMont’s body had washed up on the shores of the East River just eight days after his disappearance. His fingerprints, run through the FBI database, matched an old juvenile record. But the NYPD never informed her. Instead, they simply closed the case and buried him—unidentified—in a mass grave on forsaken Hart Island, marked only as “male.”
Thanks to her persistence, LaMont was later exhumed and reburied with dignity in Queens. But the damage was done. Dr. Fowler would never learn the true cause of his death, or even provided a homicide ruling. What she got was indifference.
She turned that grief into change.
In 2016, her efforts led to the passage of LaMont Dottin’s Law in New York, requiring all missing adult cases be entered into the NCIC database to improve tracking nationwide. She continues to advocate for better systems to identify the deceased and notify their families.
Her story is not unique.
In Mississippi, Dexter Wade was accidentally killed by a police vehicle and buried without his family’s knowledge. Another man, Marrio Moore, was buried in the same pauper’s field on the same day. His family didn’t learn of his death for eight months. And it wasn’t through official channels. They just happened to learn of it through the news.
Across the country, countless families are still waiting—sometimes years—for word about loved ones. Why? Because many jurisdictions fail to use the federal NamUs database to link missing persons with unidentified bodies. In fact, 90% of U.S. counties haven’t listed a single unclaimed person on NamUs in the last five years.
We don’t just have a crisis of violence—we have a crisis of disconnection. Families feel locked out of the very systems developed to help them with the worst tragedy of their lives.
If you’re the family member of someone missing, five steps may help:
- Call law enforcement regularly—polite, but persistent.
- Submit your loved one’s profile to NamUs.
- If possible, hire a private investigator.
- Learn your local death notification policy and press for change.
- Organize or attend a missing persons event to raise awareness.
The line between missing, murdered, and forgotten is often thinner than we think. Dr. Fowler’s story—and that of other mothers like her—reminds us that justice doesn’t always start in a courtroom. Sometimes, it begins in a kitchen, with a grieving parent who refuses to be silenced.
