Things You Need to Know About Missing Persons Reports

Often, people either wander away either because they suffer from dementia or because they are too depressed or stressed out to face the problems of life. In such situations, the search to find your missing loved one become all the more difficult as they are reluctant to return home.

If you’re looking for a missing relative and have filed a missing person report and are expecting speedy results, then it’s time you knew a few important things about filing a report:

Wait 24 hours before filing a complaint

Finding your lost relative is the realm of the police. Obviously, if you’ve filed a police complaint, it’s more than 24 hours since your relative has gone missing. Besides, they can only find an individual who’s genuinely gone missing but wants to be found. People who want to disappear and remain anonymous cannot be forcibly brought home by the police.

Contact all your family and close friends

Dementia or Alzheimer’s disease aren’t the only reasons for people disappearing from home abruptly. Sometimes, negative situations crop at home due to misunderstandings, quarrels, miscommunications, being in bad company, or even sheer carelessness. Any one of these could cause individuals to decide to disappear from the family home and environment, only to be found hours or days later with a friend with whom he shares a good rapport.

Check with everyone in your social circle to ensure that your relative is truly missing. If you draw a blank with his friends and your family, you might have to get on to other search options of contacting NamUs.

Get in touch with the National Missing and Unidentified Persons (NamUs)

Run by the US Department of Justice, NamUs is an impressive resource for those like you who are looking for a missing friend or relative. From the NamUs database, you can create a file on your missing person. This online information can help agencies and organizations everywhere to see that someone is missing. This gives the lookout for the missing person more strength.

Search the Federal Bureau of Prisons website

If information about your missing person is still elusive, try looking up the database of the prison system. This site has a tool that can locate inmates. This helps zero in the person you’re looking for. Also, check PrisonRoster, a free prison locater service.

People search websites can be useful: Get on to search sites like YoName, Pipl and Zabasearch. They will search social media networks and blogs, apart from other possible places where your missing person could be.

Search the Department of Motor Vehicles: This site has a feature called court records that can help you find your missing person. Start your search by using the individual’s name and choose from the listing you get by matching his name and details with the ones you see.

Other search options for you: You can also search in these institutions:

Nearby jails
Psychiatric Units of hospitals and private clinics in your area
Neighbourhood hotels
Friends and associates from all over the country
Airlines, taxi, bus and train services or the subway system
Homeless shelters near your home

By contacting all these institutions, you will help your family in the beginning stages of investigation. After all, your missing person could have met with an accident and was possibly admitted into hospital or sent to a psychiatric unit.

When there doesn’t seem to be any incident of foul play, homeless shelters and hotels become good options to check out. Homeless shelters seem like a good option to explore because several people here are known to suffer from schizophrenia or bi-polar which prevents them from taking the right decision in the absence of their medication.

Work with some more websites: There are several other websites that can also aid you in your search. These are:

The Federal Parent Locator Service: This is a section of the website of the Federal Office of Child Support Enforcement that provides relevant information, names of agencies and the systems that are necessary to search for missing children.

The Ultimates: This website helps with a majority of searches. It also allows users to look up several resources for people search in one place.

Welfare/Whereabouts Services Abroad: This service is set up by the Department of State and American consulates and embassies to help find American citizens abroad where there’s a state of emergency or certain questions arise regarding his welfare.

World Wide Internet Directory: This directory lists resources for finding people internationally.

Check back as often as possible: It’s not enough to tap the many resources available to you to find your missing person. You also need to chase it up to find out if any progress has been made. Persistence of this order alone will help to finally restore your missing person home.

Concluding Remarks

After getting in touch with all the organizations and websites that deal with this problem, you can also join their online forums and connect with members who have gone through similar experiences and take tips from them about finding your missing person.