Javeoni Buford: Sharp Dressed Man

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 been home in a few days, and no one knew where he was.  

“That’s when I kicked into father mode,” said Bonman. “To try and investigate what’s going on. Yes, he’s grown but at the same time he’s still my son.” 

Mensah was the one who put in the original missing report, and he has continued to search for his son for the past three years. He already knew what it was like to have a missing family member, his great niece being Alexis Patterson, one of the most well-known missing persons cases in Milwaukee. He helped his nephew after Alexis disappeared, but he never thought he would be in that situation.

“For me as a father to go through it myself,” said Mensah. “It was like ‘what could I have done?’ or if I had known a little bit sooner, would I have been able to find him?”

The last time anyone saw Javeoni was Nov. 14, 2021, when his mom Evita Buford asked him to get the Christmas tree from the garage of their north side Milwaukee home. According to police reports, Javeoni brought in the tree, went upstairs to wish his grandmother a happy birthday, and then left out the door to the garage. Evita said she sent her other kids out to get Javeoni for breakfast the next morning, but he was not there. 

The mother has been a controversial figure in the case. “If my son is dead, that’s my business,” she is accused of telling a search party in a chaotic scene.

Javeoni Buford is one of the 32,711 people who have gone missing in Milwaukee in the last 10 years, according to the Milwaukee Police Department. At any given time, about 500 people are still actively missing in Milwaukee. Many of the missing are people of color, like Buford, yet very few make the news. If they do, they often aren’t big stories.

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, police say. Many are short-term missing cases where people are quickly found, although that isn’t the case with Buford.

A team of 12 student journalists at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee spent three months investigating 18 open missing people cases, most of them people of color in the City of Milwaukee but several from smaller cities in Wisconsin. They spoke with family members and detectives and filed open records requests. In the case of Javeoni Buford, MPD declined to answer specific questions on the case, but they did release the full police file to Media Milwaukee.

That file shows that police have painstakingly investigated the case, even using cadaver dogs to search a family member’s backyard (they didn’t find anything), conducting interviews with family members, and researching human remains found in other locations. Files in more recent cases like Buford’s are far more voluminous and organized (typed versus handwritten scrawls, for example) than some of the older missing cases in Milwaukee.

The students also tackled the thorny issues lying beneath many of the cases, ranging from mental health of Black men to the city’s crack cocaine epidemic, police resources, and family dysfunction. They explored the phenomenon that academics have dubbed “missing white woman syndrome” in which people of color – especially Black men like Buford – are systemically seen as having less news value.

Javeoni has now been missing for over 1,000 days, and his family is without answers. His family continues to search, hoping to find him, but his disappearance has not generated the news coverage devoted to, say Gabby Petito, Natalee Holloway or Patterson, who was 7 when she disappeared in 2002 in Milwaukee.

Remembering His Smile

Javeoni Buford was born June 4, 1997, in Milwaukee to parents Mensah Bonman and Evita Buford. Growing up Javeoni was a happy, goofy kid who loved to spend time with his siblings. 

“The main thing that really sticks out when it comes to Javeoni was his smile and his goofiness,” said Menshae Bonman, Javeoni’s sister, in an interview with Media Milwaukee. 

Javeoni’s family describes him as hard-working and says he loves making money. Before his disappearance, he worked two jobs, at GM and Best Buy in Fox Point. With his money, Javeoni loved to buy himself nice clothes and shoes, because he loved having the best outfits. He liked to go to Chicago and lakefront festivals and had a collection of shoes, police reports say.

At the time of his disappearance, Javeoni was living in the garage of Evita’s house because she had six other kids, and he wanted extra space. At times he shared this space with his uncle, David Buford, who lived in his car in the driveway, according to police reports. 

In the months leading up to his disappearance, Javeoni’s family noticed a change in his mental state. The man who once prided himself on his outfits and locks wore all grey and kept his hood up. He would wear his hood to cover his half-shaven head, police reports say. 

“My brother,” said Menshae. “He always kept his dreadlocks in neat, decent style. He always kept himself up to par, he always had a nice car and a good-paying job. It seemed like everything was slowly crashing down.”

After Mensah reported him missing, he and Menshae began their search for Javeoni. They made missing posters with his information and posted them in Javeoni’s neighborhood. According to police reports, Evita allegedly tore down the posters because the height and weight were incorrect. 

Javeoni’s friends and family continued to look for him, forming a search party on January 8, 2022. The search party met in Javeoni’s neighborhood and went to Evita’s house. There, the search party turned chaotic, with fights breaking out and guns allegedly being brandished, according to police reports.  

“I will mourn my son when I am ready,” Evita is alleged to have said, according to police reports.

According to the reports, a blue pair of latex gloves were on the ground in the garage. Evita said she was putting down rat poison, the reports allege.

Javeoni lived in the garage because Evita had too many kids in the house, the reports say, and they add that there was allegedly conflict between Buford and his mom. An uncle who had just gotten out of jail sometimes stayed there too or lived in a car in the driveway, the reports say.

“It was never supposed to go down like this. I loved him too. I was the one that lived in the garage with him,” the uncle is accused of saying, according to the reports. When police interviewed him, he allegedly said he had stopped living in the garage because he was “scared” and had “weird dreams.” The uncle, who was accused of being armed at points, told police he had nothing to do with Buford’s disappearance, according to police reports.

Police asked the mom if they could contact the news media and feature Buford’s case on social media. A friend’s mom told police that if Buford wanted to take his own life he would “jump in the lake,” but she didn’t believe he was suicidal, the reports say.

Evita told police she tried to look for her son at the lakefront. She started crying and said it upset her when the search party tried to look in her backyard and garage, the reports say. She allowed a search of her garage and police cadaver dogs in the backyard, but nothing significant turned up, reports say.

In May 2024, Buford’s DNA was compared to human remains found in a garage, but there’s no indication in the reports that the remains ended up being him. Compounding the problems with identifications: Buford had not gone to the dentist since he was 12.

The police were called to the scene during the search party chaos and talked with members of the search party. Michelle Perkins, a friend of Javeoni’s, told the police she had entered the property to look for clues. The police then talked to Evita, who said that members of the search party had allegedly harassed her, according to police reports. The police searched the property for Javeoni and informed a few members of the search party, including Mensah, that they should not return, or they would be charged with trespassing. 

Mensah said he contacted local TV stations to report on Javeoni but they didn’t get back to him. He was able to get onto the Tory Lowe Show over a year after Javeoni’s disappearance, which he said was a big help. Tory Lowe is a community activist who hosts a show on 101.7 The Truth, and he uses his platform to cover missing person cases that are overlooked by traditional news media. Mensah stated that Tory Lowe has been the only person who has reached out to him about Javeoni. Lowe takes a special interest in cases involving missing Black men, who are often ignored by the media.

If you google Buford, the only news story that quickly comes up is a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article from 2011 which described how Buford was working on a protein model in 8th grade. He was described as “the center and power forward on his basketball team.”

“I just don’t know what to do because no one can answer my questions,” said Mensah. “Because they don’t know. Or the people that do know aren’t telling.” 

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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.