This is the second installment in a series on the shocking lack of standards around cases that involve missing children in Massachusetts. Read the first article here.
On Nov. 6, 1992, 16-year-old Jamie Lusher went missing during a bike ride in Westfield, Mass. Local police dismissed the disappearance, under the assumption that he was merely a runaway. The frantic family was told to wait through the weekend before filing a report.
According to Lusher’s sister, Jen Nowak, authorities failed to account for Jamie’s vulnerability stemming from his cognitive issues: the teen was disabled, looking and behaving younger than his age. “My father was screaming at them,” Nowak recalled. “Saying, He cannot read. He cannot write. He cannot be a runaway. It’s impossible.”
Police didn’t start actively searching for Lusher until a civilian recovered his bike in the woods a week later. In the weeks that followed, cops persistently followed and interrogated Nowak, suspecting involvement from the same family that had desperately pleaded for them to investigate.
Though a serial killer eventually confessed to killing Lusher, his body was never recovered. Today, Jen Nowak emphasizes that police need to move “instantly” after a child’s disappearance, and “take families seriously.” When it comes to accountability in this realm, though, Massachusetts remains a national outlier: it is one of the few states lacking a publicly accessible clearinghouse for missing children.
Most US states require dedicated public lists and searchable records, pulling missing children’s cases straight from state police databases. This includes progressive states, such as California and New York, as well as conservative states, such as Texas and Florida. Massachusetts’ northern neighbors, Maine and New Hampshire, offer active rosters of missing kids. Even Connecticut and Vermont maintain partial bulletins. In New England and the country at large, Massachusetts remains an exception.
The critical rescue window
For decades, critics have noted that the lack of a public missing children’s clearinghouse results in a void of accountability for law enforcement. Advocates claim that local police do not reliably submit information to central authorities when parents or others report a child missing. As was the case with Lusher, authorities may assume missing kids are runaways and hold off on filing reports or investigating altogether.
Statistically, a landmark Department of Justice-commissioned study found that nearly half of abducted and murdered children were killed within the first hour. Three-quarters were killed within three hours, and about 90% were dead within the first day.
The Office of Justice Programs is the arm of the DoJ which focuses on crime prevention. According to the OJP, the first three hours following a child’s disappearance are “crucial” for an initial response. Similarly, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children actively campaigns against delaying police reports, encouraging parents to call police the moment they realize their child is unaccounted for.
In theory, Massachusetts state law requires police officers to “immediately” enter missing child reports into a central register. Yet a review by the state’s Missing Persons Task Force in 2020 found that said central repository merely records when data is logged. No mechanism captures the exact time an investigation begins. “Without a timestamp, how can the public ever hold agencies accountable for the legally mandated immediate response?” asked forensic anthropologist Dr. Anne Marie Mires. “They can’t, really.”
Legislative stagnation
In 2008, Rep. Thomas Golden and Sen. Steven Baddour introduced a bill on Beacon Hill to establish a public clearinghouse of missing children in the state. At the time, Golden called the measure a “slam dunk,” as the bipartisan legislation had no discernible opposition in the Joint Committee on Public Safety and Homeland Security. But the bill ultimately stalled, for reasons never publicly explained.
In a 2008 Berkshire Eagle article covering the effort to establish a clearinghouse, a reporter asked Golden why it has “taken so long for Massachusetts to do what many other states already have.” The representative was unable to answer the question. That conversation happened more than 18 years ago. No similar bills have been introduced since.
The absence of a clearinghouse not only obscures the number of children missing statewide overall, but it also blurs the racial disparities within disappearances. In Boston, Black residents only make up about 20% of the overall population, but are vastly overrepresented in missing persons cases. According to National Crime Information Center data, 3,955 missing Black individuals were logged missing in Boston from 2021 to 2024, compared to 1,929 white individuals. For children ages 0 to 12, Black kids made up 63.7% of cases (vs. 31.9% white), and for people 12 to 25, Black youth represented 69.8% of cases (vs. 26.9% white).
Jen Nowak, the sister of Jamie Lusher who went missing more than 30 years ago in Westfield, said that while her family wasn’t “well-to-do,” had they been people of color, they would have contended with even greater negligence from the authorities. “If you’re in those demographics, of course you’re going to get overlooked,” she said.
Data disparities
This NCIC data is not readily available and was only acquired by advocate Mayowa “MO” Osinubi through a research project at Tufts. The inaccessibility of such data reduces the chances of public outcry over racial disparities and negligent police practices.
The commonwealth directs people to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) for public information. However, law enforcement in this state rarely elects to submit cases to this database. The federal NCIC database tracked between 1,200 and 2,200 active missing cases in Mass from 2021 to 2024, while the NamUs portal displayed only 65 cases in that same period—meaning about 94% of active missing cases are obscured from the public.
“There’s no forward-facing information at all,” said Melanie McLaughlin. A journalist and survivor, her team manually parsed through a decade of Department of Public Health records to map cold cases. She continued, “I named the 27-and-counting missing and murdered unsolved children’s cases that I was able to put together by going through DPH vital statistics. … The DA’s offices didn’t even know if cases were unresolved. Or had never even heard of certain cases.”
Mass internal transparency is so compromised that when BINJ researchers contacted the state central register, administrative staff were initially unaware they held missing child records—until state laws were cited.
