Every year in this country, over 4,000 unidentified remains are discovered. They are the bodies of mostly missing persons, whose families live in agony each day because they cannot find their loved ones. Many times, people listed as “missing” are actually found and their remains are in a county morgue or cemetery somewhere, preventing the family from having any type of closure.

After one year, approximately 1,000 of these remains are still unidentified. NamUs, the National Missing Persons and Unidentified Persons System, was developed in 2009 in an effort to help coordinate law enforcement officials across the U.S. Agencies can input information into this nation-wide database, making it easier for anyone, including individuals, to help give these people a name, and hopefully bring them home. In just a little over a year, NamUs has proved essential in solving dozens of Missing Persons cases.

But more funding is needed. As a state advocate for Missing Persons, I urge everyone to contact members of the Senate Judiciary Committee and ask them to please pass S3019, known as Billy’s Law. Senators’ names can be found at: http://judiciary.senate.gov/about/members.cfm, or you can visit the Peace 4 the Missing website at http://peace4missing.ning.com.

And I write this letter in honor of Gordon Page, Jr., an Autistic young man who has been missing since 1991.

Patti Garner