Larry Green Jr: The Wanderer

On May 30, 2020, Larry Green Jr. told his mother Catherine James that he was going to an unnamed cousin’s house and headed off. This was not out of the ordinary for Green, who was homeless and was known to bounce around family member’s houses, staying a few nights here or there. Unbeknownst to James, this would be the last time she would ever see her son. He never made it to the cousin’s house and no one in the family knows of his whereabouts. 

Those details come from the police file on his case, which was released to Media Milwaukee after an open records request.

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.  

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 Green, Milwaukee police declined to answer specific questions on the case, but they did release the full file. The information below is from the file.

Larry Green Jr. was born in Milwaukee on July 13, 1985, to parents Larry Green Sr. And Catherine James, née Toombs. In interviews with the police, Green’s family described him as a “normal person” until his twenties, when he began hanging out with the wrong crowd. According to police reports, his family believes he smoked marijuana that was laced and that it caused a change in his mental state. 

Green’s family said that before his disappearance, he was homeless and would roam around Milwaukee and allegedly steal from stores, according to police reports. The family would try to get Larry to stay with them, and at times he would, but would eventually go out once again. In an interview with MPD, Green’s aunt, Marveda Toombs, recalled a time when Green’s cousins were able to get him cleaned up so that he could attend an uncle’s funeral, but he was back out on the streets soon after. 

James was the family member who originally reported Larry missing, and she was the first to begin searching for him. The search was hard for her, as she was homeless too at the time. James told the police that at one point, the hotel she was staying at told her Green had called and left a message for her to call back. She wrote down the number on a piece of paper but was kicked out of the hotel and lost the paper before she could call him back. 

After her son went missing, family members noticed a decline in James’ physical and mental state. James continued to help the police in the search for Green, but she tragically passed away on Nov. 30, 2022. 

“Catherine was an alcoholic and had been struggling since her husband died two years ago and her adult son went missing shortly after,” said Toombs, according to police reports. 

Since James’ passing, the Milwaukee Police Department has worked with Toombs, designating her as the next of kin for Green. MPD has taken buccal swabs from Toombs to use as DNA matches for Green as they continue the search. Media Milwaukee reached out to Toombs, but she was unavailable for an interview. 

In May of 2024, DNA collected from Toombs was sent to be compared to skeletal remains found in a vacant garage in Milwaukee. The remains were found with a jacket matching one that Green was seen wearing in body camera footage from MPD and thick-rimmed black glasses similar to his, according to police reports. According to MPD, the DNA is currently in the lab waiting to be compared. 

Green’s case received very little media coverage, with only one story from FOX6 coming five months after his disappearance. The story contained Green’s description, the area where he was last seen, and that his family had offered a $2,000 reward for information regarding Green.

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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.