Sheriff’s Department (SDCSD) took virtually unprecedented action within minutes of Chelsea’s parents reporting their daughter missing. Why? Because not only was she a good, straight girl who kept a rigid schedule, but her car gave investigators a clear indication of her LKP, search-and-rescue lingo for a “last known point.”
The fact that news of her disappearance spread so fast and so many miles from her hometown was not only noticeable, but extraordinary, a factor that only served to draw even more of the public’s attention. Typically, the only flyers posted on random telephone poles around the region were for missing dogs, cats and the occasional Alzheimer’s patient.
San Diego has its roots as a conservative military town, recently attracting biotech and communications sectors. Yet, the county’s 3 million residents have traditionally been somewhat uncommunicative, partly because they’re so spread out—a problem worsened by the lack of a cohesive public transportation system. Strangers in this fragmented, transient and geographically disconnected region have rarely talked to each other, and those with personal networks have usually kept to themselves, their own church groups or book clubs.
The timing of this case and the emotions it elicited, however, generated a virtual tornado of goodwill, galvanizing the community unlike any other missing juvenile case in the region’s history.
In the midst of the Great Recession, as the unending war in the Middle East and banking bailout drove up the national debt to unprecedented heights, many people were going through tough times. Folks everywhere were losing their jobs and their homes to foreclosure and health insurance costs were soaring. More people were communicating online, telecommuting from home or stuck at home without a job, which often meant less face-to-face contact with other people and more stress.
At a time when people were hungry for connection and fellowship, the search for Chelsea King seemed to fulfill those needs. As her loss resonated throughout the region, people came together to look for this pretty young girl with so much promise, an effort that seemed worthwhile when they had so little else positive in their lives. Chelsea helped them become part of a community again, to feel they were part of something bigger than themselves.
This sense of alliance, hope and affiliation spread like the wildfires that had devastated much of Rancho Bernardo in 2007, when many folks also came together to try to help each other. With assistance from the Texas-based Laura Recovery Center, the Chelsea King Search Center was set up to print flyers and distribute maps out of the RB United office, a remnant of those wildfires.
As Poway High School (PHS) junior Jimmy Cunningham wrote in the Iliad, his school newspaper: The more people who knew, the more ground that was covered. Searching eyes were everywhere, and at the rate that the awareness was being spread due to network communication, it wasn’t long before every pair of eyes in a fifty-mile radius knew exactly who she was: Chelsea King—[an] intelligent, willful, and loving girl.
News of Chelsea’s plight soon went viral, spreading not only across the county and the nation, but around the globe, with well-wishing strangers conveying their sentiments online from Australia, Germany and even Pakistan. A world away, they were just as moved by the sheer goodness, the promise of a bright future and the angelic expression they could see reflected in those blue eyes of hers.
Back home, Kelly King, her eyes red from crying, made tearful pleas on the local TV news: “She’s such a good girl. She needs to come home,” she said, her voice breaking with grief.
The King family was well-off and well connected in a community that already had established social networks—business groups, sports teams or dance troupes—it’s just that they’d never been called into action for this purpose. As parents and their kids e-mailed or texted news updates to each other, they were retexted, re-Tweeted and reposted, spreading the infectious inspiration to help.
Take Mike Workman, a father of five, for instance. Workman’s twelve-year-old son was on an elite traveling baseball team with some boys who had played ball with Chelsea’s brother, Tyler, on a field in Poway. One of the team managers was a close friend of Brent’s, and he urged each of the boys’ parents to use their respective networks to further the search efforts.
The day after Chelsea went missing, Workman and his boy were willingly recruited. The two of them showed up for search training at a business park in RB on that rainy Saturday, February 27, only to get turned away because searchers had to be eighteen years old. So they went to the parking lot across the street, where flyers were being distributed out of an RV. When Workman saw they were running low, he and his son had several hundred more made at a nearby print shop, which were then distributed to volunteers, who posted them in store windows at shopping malls throughout the county.
“You thought, ‘This could be me. I’d want people to help me. What can I do to help?’” Workman recalled. “People really do want to help. I think they’re tired of conflict.”
Chapter 4
John was still in a manic mood when he got home around 5:30 P.M. on Friday, February 26. He insisted that Cathy give him a ride to meet his girlfriend, Jariah, at a Narcotics Anonymous (NA) meeting half an hour away in Escondido, because he had no car of his own. He said he wanted to ask the guys there about drug rehab places that might admit him.
Before they left the condo, Cathy followed up on her promise at the salon. “Did you hear there was a girl that went missing out of the park yesterday?” she asked. “I was just wondering if you’d seen anything while you were walking around.”
John shrugged off her question, later complaining that he thought Cathy was accusing him of something. “No,” he told his mother dismissively. “I wasn’t paying attention to what was going on.”
Thinking the NA meeting would be good for John, even if it was a bit of a drive, Cathy gave him a ride over there. At least, she’d know where he was. After she went back to pick him up at nine-thirty, she told him they were going to visit his grandmother in the hospital up in Inglewood the next day.
Still worried about her son’s erratic behavior, Cathy had decided to take that Monday off from work so she could take him back to the same psychiatric unit in Riverside County and demand this time that he be admitted on a 5150. But she didn’t tell John of her plans, in case he freaked out and ran off somewhere.
As Cathy and John were driving through the neighborhood Saturday morning on their way to visit Linda, they saw a bunch of patrol cars at the park, where the sheriff’s department had set up a command center. Cathy briefly considered helping to search for Chelsea as she had for Amber Dubois, a fourteen-year-old freckled brunette with light blue eyes who had gone missing on her way to Escondido High School more than a year earlier. But dealing with a sick son and a sick mother had sapped any time and energy Cathy normally would have spent watching the news when she got home from work, let alone go out searching for another missing girl.
Not this time, she told herself.
Despite being separated, Amber’s parents, Carrie McGonigle and Maurice “Moe” Dubois, had spent the past year working ferociously together to keep up the search for their book- and animal-loving teenager. Carrie had even tattooed her daughter’s name on her wrist.
But after two initial sightings in front of Amber’s school, downtown Escondido and in the hills near her house, authorities were no closer to finding her—even with the offer of $100,000 in reward money, the work of at least two private detectives and more than 1,200 leads from psychics and others who had called the Escondido Police Department (EPD) with tips. Although not to the same extent as Chelsea’s disappearance, Amber’s missing person’s case was also widely publicized, with her photo making the cover
