Special Projects

After no one had heard or seen from 27-year-old Alonzo Lamar for over 20 days this summer, he was found on the side of the street, in an unsettling blank state, with a large bump on his head and no memory of what had happened to him, or even the names of his family members. […]

Jeffrey Dahmer’s crimes were not noticed for years, and some of his victims were never immediately reported missing. The lessons about how missing persons reports are handled are clear for those who were connected to the case. Allyson Smith, cousin of Glenda Cleveland, who lived near Dahmer, explained that many of Dahmer’s victims had minimal […]

There’s a video on Sherry Shareef’s (formerly Sherry Hopgood) Instagram that was posted in August of 2024. It features a young Black woman caught in old photographs of different moments of her life. One photograph is of her leaning down with her arms wrapped around two young boys. Her dark hair is straightened and pulled […]

Every one of the approximately 3,000 missing people of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, has a story, but so do the officers behind them. An officer who once hated the police and cleaned homes for a living, a sergeant who’s living out the dream from when she was 2-years-old, and a Milwaukee police captain seeking to help those […]

On a late November night in 2005, Tory Lowe was working at a local meat packing plant in Worthington, MN. Lowe was the second Black manager, and the first in the maintenance department. Lowe says he was ordered to go to the back patio. According to Lowe, he went out to the back patio where […]

She was barely 16 years old when she last saw her son, Christopher. The toddler was swept into the web of a fractured and estranged family. Where is Christopher Harris? Today he would be 28 years old, and Elizabeth Harris-Liuhouolo has spent her adult years trying to find him. She thinks she has, and she’s […]

Carvell Jennings’ daughter, Ebony Jennings, believes her dad should be a national story.  “In the beginning, multiple different media outlets like the (Milwaukee) Journal Sentinel reached out,” Ebony Jennings said in an interview with Media Milwaukee. But then the news coverage dwindled to a smattering (WISN-TV did run a story in November), and the national […]

From the turn of the century to the 1970s, there was a mass exodus of Black Americans from the South. Driven from the South due to racist legislation and the ever-present threat of racial violence, they moved northward. Many of these migrants settled in industrial cities in the North, like Chicago, Detroit and Milwaukee. This […]

For Victor Huyke, owner and president of El Conquistador Latino Newspaper, missing people became personal for him. “One of my friends growing up, Richard Guerrero, eventually it was found out that he was” a victim of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, Huyke said. “So many years later, Marty Guerrero, Richard’s brother, is missing,” Huyke added. “There […]

This story is part of a semester-long investigative reporting project into missing people’s cases in Milwaukee and Wisconsin. It was created by an advanced reporting class in the Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies program at UW-Milwaukee. Other stories from the project are available here.

On Nov. 12, 2021, Mensah Bonman was expecting a birthday call from his 24-year-old son Javeoni Buford, who always called him on his birthday. Javeoni never called, and that signaled to Bonman that something was up. He would receive a call from Javeoni’s maternal brother several days later, who told him that Javeoni had not […]

In Media Milwaukee’s attempts to get in contact with the Johnnie Patterson family, a student journalist called over 100 phone numbers without an answer. Soon after Carrie Davis, Patterson’s daughter, called back and agreed to do an interview.  When the team of student journalists arrived at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Golda Meir Library on the […]