Carvell Jennings: What Happened to the Milwaukee Man?

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 spotlight never came.

“Why does it seem like the media stopped reporting on him?”  she asks of her missing father, 59.

Carvell Jennings vanished from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in May 2024. He walked out of a group home where he was living and disappeared. He is part of a Milwaukee family whose asphalt company once paved the Hoan Bridge.

“I’m very protective over my dad, he means the world to me,” Ebony said. “He taught me everything I know; he was genuinely funny and kind.”   

“My dad has been my support my entire life. He once went and picked me up at 4 in the morning because I felt uncomfortable with someone, which resulted in his car running out of gas, and he had to walk the rest of the way to get me. We ended up walking home together.”  

About 32,711 people have gone missing in the City of Milwaukee in the last 10 years, according to the Milwaukee Police Department. At any given time, about 500 people are actively missing in Milwaukee. Many are people of color, yet very few make the news, at least not much. 

Carvell Jennings is among the missing.

In 2024 through Oct. 15, 2,466 people were reported missing in the city. Each year in the past decade, between 2,500 and 3,300 people have been reported missing each year. Many are short-term missing cases where people are quickly found, highlighting a crisis of online grooming, group home runaways, and other issues. Stereotypical stranger abductions are exceptionally rare, and those are the ones that tend to be highlighted in the news. 

A team of 12 student journalists spent three months investigating 18 open missing people cases, most of them people of color in Milwaukee but several from smaller Wisconsin cities. The students spoke with family members and detectives and filed open records requests.  In the case of Jennings, Milwaukee police declined to answer specific questions on the case, but they did release the full police file to Media Milwaukee. It shows an exhaustive search throughout the community for Jennings – to no avail.

Carvell Jennings went missing on May 12, 2024, and has been known to have seizures.

Golden View, an assisted living center, initially noticed Jennings missing and called his daughter Ebony. Carvell was acting a little differently, according to one of the employees at Golden View, and tended to go places without telling anyone, coming back at a later time the same day. He has left Golden View on different occasions but has always gone back at a reasonable time.

There was no silver alert alerting the public that Carvell went missing since he was 59, one month short of turning 60. The minimum age for silver alerts happens to be 60 years old. There was an endangered missing person alert instead of a silver alert due to the age. All that is according to the police report. 

The reports also say:

Jennings is a Black male who is 5 foot 7 inches tall, 127 pounds with a thin build, black and grey hair, and brown eyes,  He has a short gray beard and was last seen wearing a black and gray shirt, black pants, white shoes and a blue skull cap.

Jennings was struggling with serious health issues shortly before he disappeared; he had fallen and bumped his head and was admitted to Froedtert Hospital for a brain bleed and was discharged on May 10.

MPD tried to get the silver alert issued but the Department of Justice said he was one month short of the deadline, the reports show.

Police checked many local businesses and other locations, including Family Dollar and Target, and they did so many times, the reports show. Here is just one page in the police file. There are many more like it:

He was seen at Target on May 14 at 10:42 pm. Police checked every bus stop near the Target store.

He had been seen panhandling and a Wauwatosa police officer met with him at Target but did not know he was missing at the time, a report says, although there is contradictory information about this.

Police went to the Target store several times but were unable to find Jennings. They gave missing person fliers to every

Ebony also went to Target but did not believe her dad was the man in the video footage.

At one point, a man claimed to Carvell’s daughter that Carvell was being held for ransom in Waukesha County. It is sadly not unusual for scammers to target families in missing person cases.

Police drove around looking for Jennings. They even went to the cemetery where his mother was buried. They talked to everyone they could find who knew him.

A man said he last saw Jennings panhandling at Target on May 16. But he was mistaken. Such mistaken reports take up police resources.

Officers again canvassed the neighborhood, providing missing person fliers at locations ranging from Mad Chicken to Petco.

Various citizens called in with sightings, including a Wendy’s worker who said he ordered nuggets there on May 15. Police contacted hospitals.

He needed a caretaker because he had a stroke and was on government assistance. He would visit stores to buy beer and previously had a drug problem. Ebony told police she believed that he would sit on bus stops and watch people and visit Midtown but that he would not panhandle.

He had refused to eat in the hospital and she believed he weighs close to 106 pounds. She didn’t want him to leave the hospital but he was discharged back to the group home.

Police got DNA and checked his debit cards. Throughout the summer, they received several reports from people who thought they had seen Carvell but nothing panned out. Ebony told police that a psychic told her he was deceased.

In May, Carvell was hallucinating and disoriented. He walked into a linen closet and made comments about his deceased mother. He had lost 30 pounds in the past year and had stopped eating.  He would put a TV remote to his ear like it was a cell phone.

A Mechanic by Trade

The Jennings family came from Mississippi, and Ebony’s grandfather ended up starting an asphalt company in Milwaukee, called Jennings’ Asphalt. Ebony’s grandfather, Johnny, married her grandfather, moving from Mississippi, and coming to Milwaukee, she says. Carvell is a mechanic by trade and overprotective of his only child, Ebony. Their family company paved the Hoan Bridge in Milwaukee, allowing cars to cross it and see the lake. They paved it back when it first opened.  

“After a month or two, people stopped wanting to try to find my father,” continued Ebony, “It feels like there are racial disparities in our communities.”  

Police were given different locations to search for Carvell, but he wasn’t at any of them.

There is a last known location. Carvell Jennings disappeared at W. Burleigh Ave. and N. 35th St. and took the Blue Line bus to get there.  

Since then, no one has seen him, and Ebony is still looking for him. Carvell has not been seen in the Milwaukee area.

Carvell tended to frequent the same spots. He wouldn’t stray from a routine and liked to be at home.  

“Someone knows something,” states Ebony, “The areas where I am trying to look for him are large.”

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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.