|Finding Molly Bish |
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|Finding Molly Bish |
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"The new (national) Amber Alert law is for Molly and it wouldn't have been enacted without you.'' US Senator Ted Kennedy§» «§
Amber AlertMassachusetts, USA
A daughter on the run
By Eileen McNamara, Globe Columnist, 6/29/2003 A rapist, not a kidnapper, is
responsible for the disappearance of Monteiro's runaway
daughter, but this child of poverty is no less vulnerable out
there alone than was Molly Bish, snatched from a rural swimming
hole. On June 14, Monteiro's daughter
had been released from a mental health center where she was
evaluated after sudden, unprecedented episodes of running away
from home. During her 45-day-stay at the Diagnostic Assessment
Center in Attleboro she began for the first time to deal with
having been raped last summer when she was 13. Therapists
concluded that her running away was prompted by post-traumatic
stress disorder. ''She has never been the same,''
says her tearful mother, who took her daughter to a rape crisis
center last July after getting her medical attention and filing
a police report. ''She went one time, but she told me she was OK
and did not want to go back. I should have made her.'' Instead, her daughter began to
run, so often that her mother turned to the state Department of
Social Services for help. ''She wanted to keep her safe, and I
think she felt she couldn't handle her by herself, so we took
her and sent her to Attleboro for an assessment,'' says Denise
Monteiro, spokeswoman for DSS and no relation to the family.
''She did very well there.'' When her stay ended, DSS
transferred her to a group home in Medford, where she was given
an MBTA pass. She bolted. Her mother complains that the setting
was all wrong for a girl who was a known flight risk: ''She
needed to be closely watched.'' Monteiro of DSS responds that
its residential facilities are not designed to keep children
under lock and key: ''She is a rape victim, not a criminal.'' Whatever she needed on June 14,
everyone agrees that what she needs now is to be found. To that
end, Detective Billy Mulcahy spent Friday, in the sweltering
summer heat, making the rounds of known haunts of teenage
runaways in the blue-collar cities north of Boston, looking for
the petite brunette who wears her long hair in a bun. ''He's
been out all day,'' says his colleague, Detective Trish
Sullivan. ''I have a 14-year-old daughter at home. We know what
that mother is going through.'' Elizabeth Monteiro has been
mining her own experience with the state's human services
bureaucracy to try to find her daughter. ''Nothing good can come
to her out on the street. I have to do everything I can,'' she
says. She has appealed for help to the
city of Boston's liaison to the Cape Verdean community. She has
found an ally in the juvenile probation department in Norfolk
County, and another at Boston Police Department headquarters.
She has used the telephones and the fax machines at The
Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless, where she gets moral
support from workers who last year helped her negotiate her way
through the emergency shelter system to an apartment of her own
in Malden. ''She is a wonderful mother. We
wish there was more we could do,'' says Kelly Turley of the
coalition, who shares Monteiro's exasperation with DSS for not
exercising sufficient caution in its placement of the girl.
''It's very disturbing that there could be such a lack of
communication. Elizabeth went to the state asking for help. They
were willing to take on her daughter. Where is their
responsibility for keeping her safe?'' Monteiro of DSS says the agency's
group homes are not prisons, nor should they be. As to what DSS
is doing now to help find Elizabeth Monteiros' daughter, she
says: ''We're like any parent. You call the police and you
wait.'' Hold the helicopters. Eileen
McNamara can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com This story ran on page B1 of the
Boston Globe on 6/29/2003.
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