The search for a missing person in Philadelphia reveals the challenges of locating the lost across the U.S.

No one in Philadelphia has been looking for Ali Bsharat, the 26-year-old Palestinian man who was reported missing over six months ago.

Around 9 p.m. on July 5th, 2014, Ali called his family in the Feltonville neighborhood of the city to let them know he was on his way home from work. He never showed up. A missing persons report was filed with the Philadelphia Police Department a few days later, describing Ali as 5’ 4” in a white t-shirt and blue jeans, weighing about 150 lbs., and maybe driving a gray 2000 Toyota Sienna.

This information is buried in the annals of the PPD’s missing persons blog. The department regularly updates these profiles when a body has been located, be it dead or alive. Detectives are required to check back in with the missing person’s next of kin once a week after a filed disappearance, and then every thirty days after a certain number of months have passed, with or without leads. Northeast Detective Division checked the system over the phone and disclosed that, sure enough, Ali’s file was open — a “missing endangered person.”

Should we have heard of Ali Bsharat?

Most missing persons cases don’t make the headlines. There are exceptional cases that hold the national spotlight for weeks, months, and years on end, but those are by and large cases of abducted minors. The recent five-week search for the body of Shane Montgomery held Philadelphia captive. Adults of all ages disappear every day for countless untold reasons. The latest FBI data says that adults comprise roughly 60 percent of the 85,000 unsolved missing persons in the United States. But understandably, the police don’t issue Amber Alerts for grown men who never come home from work. Their danger is much less apparent than that of a 9-year-old girl who never makes it home from the school bus.

Age and circumstance of disappearance are the two most important factors in directing attention towards a missing person, according to the Bob Lowery, vice president in charge of the missing children division at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).

“If we put out every case nationally, we would desensitize the American public,” he said.

Still, the national hard-line policy of a missing person is that they remain missing until a body is located. NCMEC handles the cases of between 3,500 and 4,000 persons who went missing at 0-21 years of age. Even in these cases, if someone goes missing as a child, they remain in NCMEC’s database until they are located.  Search for Philadelphia on their website and you’ll find Beverly Sharpman, who said she was going to Overbrook High School to register for her senior classes, and hasn’t been positively identified to this day. She was 16 years old. That was almost 68 years ago.

“In the long-term, sometimes we’re frustrated that we can’t seem to get enough media attention on a certain case, and other times we get tons,” Lowery said. “We have cases of missing children, especially as they get older, that don’t seem to get enough attention. We try, though. We assess resources and public exposure by what we consider the risks of these individuals are. But sometimes it’s frustrating.”

Lowery explained that missing persons awareness needs to be highly localized. NCMEC uses ad space for missing persons in areas specific to each case. Social media also plays a huge role in how we spread awareness of missing persons now. Individuals looking for their loved ones can be their own media outlets.

But there’s been little local mention of Ali Bsharat since July 2014: no “Help Find Ali” campaigns on Facebook from family, no tweets from friends, no posters on Feltonville’s telephone polls or in its bodegas. Only the PPD’s website and one short blog entry on a sleuthing forum shared the picture of Ali’s brown eyes and well-trimmed beard.

The two obvious possibilities: either Ali’s next of kin hasn’t wanted to advertise his disappearance, or Ali isn’t missing at all.

NCMEC cross-references their missing children cases through the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs). Available in Spanish and English, NamUs is a free open source service for identifying missing, unidentified, and unclaimed persons nationwide. Its purpose is to aggregate all missing persons in the U.S. into one comprehensive, fully-searchable database that will allow cases to be solved more quickly.

There are a number of reasons why a family may not want any extra attention. Todd Matthews, director of case management and spokesman for NamUs, has handled thousands of missing persons cases, and there are still surprises.

Matthews has seen the living declared dead and the dead living. He’s worked with individuals trying to report a missing adult person only to be turned away by the police. There are small town law enforcement teams in his native south that didn’t even know what a missing persons case was until it happened to them. Matthews’ job is not just the cold case, but the nonexistent case. Partly because of this he operates on a strict rule of investigation:

“I’ve learned never to assume,” he said.

Matthews even has his own stories of conflicted interests in missing persons cases. A drug-addicted cousin would jump off the radar for long periods at a time. And after Matthews’ aunt died, he wanted to track down the cousin to let him know his mother had passed, but didn’t want to ask the police for help or file a missing persons report because the cousin had preexisting legal troubles.

While NamUs is available to anyone who goes missing in the U.S., undocumented residents may avoid seeking help from law enforcement and the media for fear of casting light on their status. Moreover, with the digital divide still high in many lower-income areas, some families may not have the easy option of social media advertisement. Sometimes individuals are reported missing because they’ve run away for domestic reasons. What happened to Ali Bsharat? Never assume.

Sometimes police reports are even falsified. Philadelphia technically still has a 1997 open case on Nicole Miracle Santa-Cruz. Between three or four months old, the Latina baby was reported missing by her father. The story was that he had left her with a babysitter before going to visit his mother for Mother’s Day, and when he came back, neither the baby nor the sitter could be found. The child was infected with HIV and required daily medication. Almost 18 years later, the PPD disclosed in an information request from AL DIA that the babysitter was never identified as real. City workers scoured the city for signs of Nicole Miracle Santa-Cruz, but she was never found. No arrests were made, and the father reportedly died a year later.

The name Ali Bsharat turned up in one other local search — a Philadelphia Neighborhoods article from September 2012. It was a short write-up about Al Salam Pizzeria and Al Madena Meat Market, a halal grocery and eatery in Germantown. A 24-year-old named Ali Bsharat was quoted talking about the butcher’s menu and the Ramadan specials. He’d been working the meat counter since that February, over two years before 26-year-old Ali Bsharat called his family at 9 p.m. to say he’d be home soon. The meat market closes at 7 p.m., but Al Salam serves pizza until 9 p.m.. Maybe he stayed late to help out or clean up.

One of the employees recalled that Ali used to work there. According to him, Ali was married and had a child. He knew Ali’s two brothers as well, Ala and Aziz. But he couldn’t remember if Ali had been working there in July 2014 at the time of the missing persons report. He did know about the disappearance, though, as Ali’s father, who frequented the store, came in looking for him. He doesn’t know what happened after that. The only thing he heard was that Ali’s brothers had moved to Palestine. He didn’t have any of their contact information, and suggested trying Facebook.

Just 4.5 miles south of Al Salam Pizzeria and Al Madena Food Market on Germantown Avenue, Al-Aqsa Islamic Society runs out of a brightly muralled and mosaiced building. Between its mosque, school, and halal grocery store, Al-Aqsa serves thousands of Philadelphia’s Muslim community in Philadelphia. Ali’s former coworker at Al Salam said that while he didn’t remember Ali himself being very religious, he knew his family members were practicing Muslims. After a few calls within the Al-Aqsa community, Nabith, one of the mosque leaders, redirected the search to Hamza Bsharat.

Hamza works at the All State on Front Street in Feltonville not far from where Ali was reported missing. He is related to Ali, although they aren’t very close. While he doesn’t know the details of what happened, he spoke of Ali’s whereabouts with certainty.

“He is overseas now,” he said. “All of his family is overseas now.”

But he is still reported missing?

“Well, he was missing,” Hamza said, “And when they found him they left and went overseas.”

Last week, East Detective Division disclosed over the phone that Ali Bsharat was still listed as missing in their system — a point reflected on the website. After numerous requests through their Public Affairs office, PPD reported that the case had in fact been closed. Ali had been found, but no further information was released. The Public Affairs office declined AL DIA’s request for an interview with Detective Michelle Yerkes. Nonetheless, the department was informed of the apparent discrepancy in the case, and asked to identity Ali Bsharat as “located” on the PPD missing persons blog. 

No one was looking for Ali Bsharat because Ali Bsharat wasn’t missing.

As of this article’s publication, his location hasn’t been confirmed. Ali's post has since been removed from the PPD missing person's blog. Nonetheless, the glitch that led to this attempt to locate him highlights the reason for NamUs’ existence — for all missing and unidentified persons to be in a definitive centralized database. A link to Ali’s file on the NamUs database returned “access denied.” Despite that the local PPD blog didn’t reflect this, Matthews later told AL DIA that the NamUs entry had been made for Ali, and that local law enforcement confirmed he had been found.

Here’s how it works. Matthews and his team serve as the liaison between local law enforcement, medical coroners, and the bereaved families and friends of the missing. They collect dental records, coroner’s reports medical histories, fingerprints — any physiological clue that could help unite a missing person with their next of kin. There are far more serious informational oversights than the one with Ali and the PPD blog.

“This is where we fill in the gaps,” Matthews said. “Medical examiners and law enforcement don’t always get along. Sometimes information isn’t shared.”

It’s one thing for a reporter to lose a few hours’ sleep searching for the whereabouts of a John Doe, but it’s nothing compared to what the kin of the missing go through every day. Matthews uses the analogy of a parent losing a child for a moment in the supermarket. They reach for a can on the shelf, turn around, and the child’s not there anymore.

“Now imagine those two seconds going on for 30 years,” Matthews said. “Imagine that pain and confusion and uncertainty. These people are living with that.”

Matthews has worked with families waiting on DNA comparisons from an unidentified body that they thought to be their missing loved one. When the results came back negative, they were devastated. They want the body; they want something to bury.

“Missing is worse than dead,” he went on. “We’re not programmed to accept uncertainty, to accept a missing person. That’s why I want to solve this problem as much as I can. We talk to these people, try to give them hope, and we look at them with such respect. They’re incredibly strong.”

Missing persons are sometimes referred to as a “silent mass disaster.” They number in the hundreds of thousands, but spread out over time and space. NamUs and its exchanges with other organizations like NCMEC are successful at fighting the problem. Still, local law enforcement is not federally required to have their records match those on NamUs and vice versa.

A bill titled Billy’s Law, a.k.a. the Help Find the Missing Act, is being reintroduced in Congress, and NamUs is hopeful that it will pass. If it does, it would require the merger of state and federal resources to help facilitate missing persons cases and bring suffering families to either reunion or closure in the most efficient way possible.