‘Stop Everything and Find Them!’: More than 1K Ohio Children Reported Missing in 2023

Ohio officials are deeply concerned, as more than 1,000 children have been reported missing so far in 2023.

Around 45 children disappeared from the Cleveland-Akron area in September, the New York Post reported Tuesday, adding that according to the state’s attorney general, 35 went missing in August.

More than 1K kids reported missing in Ohio in ‘extraordinary surge’ https://t.co/cN15eDjfKD pic.twitter.com/3460SDc3jE

— New York Post (@nypost) September 26, 2023

The unsettling trend began when approximately 30 children disappeared two weeks into May.

During an interview on June 2, Newburgh Heights Police Chief John Majoy told Live Now Fox, “We don’t want to raise public alarm that the kids are being randomly abducted off the streets or something like that.”

“Some of these might be runaways. There’s no evidence of any abductions at this point. We would have had an Amber Alert or [inaudible] some other type of alert,” Majoy noted:

“It’s an unusually high number for a two-week period early in May, but again, we just want to get the word out there to the public because we want the public to be able to help us out and bring these kids home safe,” he explained.

On Monday, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost again said the numbers are concerning, but the figure might not be completely accurate because of inconsistencies when updating reports.

He said, “Now, what we know is when we look behind the numbers, some of those represent repeated runaways, and local police have talked about that.”

Data on runaways, abductions, or sex trafficking cases were not always input correctly, and the state is grappling with a shortage of law enforcement officials, Yost also explained.

State leaders have partnered with the University of Toledo to create an updated statewide data collection reporting system to find solutions.

Social media users commented on the Post‘s story, one person writing, “A thousand? A THOUSAND!?!?! From one area? How the hell is this not the biggest story in the country?”

“Stop everything and find them!” another replied.

According to a NewsNation report from June, the U.S. Marshals Service said that in 2021, there were 300,000 missing children. Ninety-one percent of them were runaways, and one out of six were trafficked:

Supervisory Deputy U.S. Marshal Alex Rutter told the outlet, “When you look at those numbers, it almost takes your breath away to think that one in six kids out of that many kids are being potentially sexually trafficked.”

According to the Post article, parents have joined forces to try and find the missing children.

Breana Brown created the group called Join Us in Minors Protection. She said, “We have so many missing children; we want to prevent this from happening, so we need to buckle down. This is not a matter we should take lightly, not at all.”