IRMO, SOUTH CAROLINA: Two children have been missing from their foster home in Lexington County since Wednesday, August 2, as per officials.
Neville Ritchey, 15, and Bre Ritchey, 11, have been missing since they left their home in Irmo's Whitehall neighborhood around 8 pm. The Lexington County Sheriff's Department said that they are cooperating with other law enforcement agencies to search for the brother and sister. Even though the children were residing in South Carolina, they were born in North Carolina, and the SC Department of Social Service (DSS) does not have custody of them.
The Child Crime Prevention and Safety Center estimates that a child goes missing in the US every 40 seconds
The Child Crime Prevention and Safety Center estimates that a child goes missing in the US every 40 seconds, with thousands of these cases going unreported. Moreover, the disappearance of foster children escaping is apparently more frequent, according to private investigator Chandra Cleveland. As of now, Neville and Bre are said to have run away from their foster home.
The Department of Social Services explained that just like any other missing child, children in foster care who run away are reported to the National Crime Information Center Database, leading to them working closely with law enforcement frequently to search for missing foster children. Representatives of DSS said, "When children in foster care run away the primary mechanism for finding them is a report to law enforcement ... Along with meeting with family and caregivers in an attempt to determine factors that may have contributed to the child running away, and reaching out to friends, acquaintances, teammates, teachers, coaches, etc," as reported by News19.
'You need to make sure you're looking in their face each and every day'
A private investigator, Chandra Cleveland, claimed that parents and guardians can frequently predict a child's intention to flee before it actually does, explaining, "You need to make sure you're looking in their face each and every day, watch the signs of the body language, the clothing they will do, and the conversations they will say." "If they say 'I don't care what we do', and everything is 'I don't care'. There's something wrong there that you need to dig a little deeper with," added Cleveland. Without the inclusion of Ritchey children, the Nation Center for Missing and Exploited Children reports that there are currently 71 missing children in the state of South Carolina.
