Beyond The Frame: Leonard Foster, 30 Years Gone

The winter of 1994 was especially brutal, with what was described as the 1994 North American cold wave occurring over the Midwestern and Eastern regions of the United States. When 20-year-old Leonard Demarcus Foster went missing that winter, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, became colder.

Friends and family called him Mark – referencing his middle name, Demarcus. He was last seen on Dec, 17, 1993, nearly three decades ago. But recollecting on that winter, with mountains of snow covering the streets of Milwaukee and the wind bitter cold, Mark’s family was putting up missing posters around the city. And when someone told them to stop, they obeyed.

The last person to see Mark Foster was his friend, Mario Mallet. Mallet had just turned 21 years old, and last saw Foster at 29^th and Highland in West Milwaukee leaving in a Brown 70’s style stick shift van. But Mark was not alone. Police records state that Mallet saw Foster leaving with a man with a dark complexion and a mustache, an estimated age of late 30’s to early 40’s. The two were allegedly traveling to South Milwaukee to look at a gun and a VCR that was for sale. Mark was never seen again after that. No sightings of the man accompanying Foster were recorded after that.

He was reported missing by his girlfriend, Tondalayo Davis, on Jan. 4, 1994. The couple had just welcomed a son into the world, Leonard Jr. The information above and that follows comes from the voluminous police reports on the case.

In a 1996 police interview, Davis said that it seems strange, but occasionally her then 3-year-old would state that he was, “with his daddy” nearly three years after his father’s disappearance. Standing at 5’7 with a light complexion and brown eyes matching his hair, Mark is a father, a brother, and a young man in the Milwaukee community – and a story we have heard before. But do we hear this story enough? When young Black men go missing, where do communities turn to? Do sporadic news reports and police investigations go the distance alone?

Mark’s case is just one of the 18 open missing person cases that 12 University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee student journalists are investigating. This team spent three months diving into the lives and case files of long- and short-term missing people. Most of them being people of color in Milwaukee but several being from smaller Wisconsin cities. Speaking with family members and detectives, students filed open records requests; with the Milwaukee Police Department releasing full case files to Media Milwaukee. The team hopes to bring these missing person stories to light, not only to bring awareness to their cases, but also highlight systemic issues.

According to the Milwaukee Police Department, about 32,711 people have been reported as missing in the City of Milwaukee in the last 10 years. 32,711 lives, families, and stories waiting to be told. At any given time, about 500 people are actively missing in Milwaukee. Many are people of color, yet very few make the news.

Media Milwaukee received Mark’s case file and read the 92 pages of interviews, information, and reports. Many of these files obtained on this project are of the same length and density, with some pages faded and worn scans of nearly unreadable handwritten logs.

In the files Media Milwaukee obtained, cases highlighted a short-staffed police department with a decimated detective bureau and a single detective in charge of all missing person cases at any one time. The files showed varying levels of investigations, with some being exhaustive.

Foster’s Family Has Theories

There were many familial theories on Mark Foster’s disappearance. In a police interview in May of 1995, Foster’s Uncle, Oliver McHatten, shared that he thinks that Mark may have gone to Rockford, Illinois, after Mark’s girlfriend had moved there with their child; or that he was loitering at a drug house off Capitol Drive – having allegedly been involved in drug culture in Milwaukee, though he held no drug history with the police and had never been arrested.

He did have one warrant for him, on an expired driver’s license case and a $500 bond. Though while police were interviewing Foster’s mother, she stated that she suspected her son of dealing drugs in Milwaukee. At this time, on the “Milwaukee Police Department Supplementary Missing Person Report” the reason for Mark’s disappearance changed from a written “Unknown” to “Drug Trafficking” – The large cursive letters standing out on the bottom of the faded page.

Crack cocaine did have a significant and devastating impact on Milwaukee communities in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Like many urban areas across the United States, Milwaukee was deeply affected by the crack epidemic, which brought about severe social, economic, and health consequences.

Ruben Burgos, who served on the Milwaukee Police force for 32 years, has seen much of the crack cocaine epidemic’s effects on Milwaukee communities. He is now a senior lecturer in Criminal Justice & Criminology at UW-Milwaukee and is an expert in crime intelligence.

His office is layered with photos and trinkets, all posed with the evidence of a long and successful career and a life lived well. From the south side of Milwaukee, Burgos spent 32 years at the Milwaukee Police Department, with 22 of those years as a detective, five years as lieutenant of the Intelligence Division, and five more with Police Management. Graduating from the police academy in 1982 and going active duty in 1986, Burgos saw the drug wars firsthand. “I was young, and I was seeing shootings every night,” Burgos says.

“Sometimes these victims and individuals fall into the drug world and kind of fall off the face of the earth,” Burgos says, relating to how drugs may influence individuals who go missing.

“They’re users and they’re abusers, but they are also victims of the drug. They get hooked in very easily, given stuff for free in the beginning and they get hooked, and then they’re done. They start out casual and get drawn in very quickly.”

Many individuals are causalities in the drug and narcotic epidemic, an epidemic that has decimated so many individuals. “Crack cocaine hit the city very hard,” Burgos explains. “It was a bad epidemic; you could get crack anywhere.”

The introduction of the drug in Milwaukee mirrored the patterns seen in many other major cities. Crack cocaine disproportionately affected Milwaukee’s African-American and Latino communities, many of which were already facing high rates of poverty, unemployment, and systemic disinvestment. Families were torn apart by addiction and the economic impact was also felt in these communities, as large numbers of people were either incarcerated for drug-related offenses or became unemployable due to addiction, further contributing to cycles of poverty.

In 2022, Leonard’s half-sister Marquita had an interview with then Sensitive Crimes P.O. Keyona Vine, who was assigned to missing person cases. According to the report, before Foster went missing, Marquita was residing in Louisiana – and got a call from her half-brother, asking for money. She said that he was selling drugs and would call and ask for money because “People were after him.” Marquita stated that when she was growing up, her mother fell into the drug culture that heavily impacted Milwaukee communities in the 1980’s and 1990’s, and that they would often travel from shelter to shelter.

“It was rampant,” Burgos says. “A lot of people were using it, there was money to be made. People making lots and lots of money. Stopping kids dealing on the corner with $200, $300 in their pocket. It was teenagers, and how can you stop them from dealing when they’re making that kind of money?”

According to the 1994 Yearly Police Report, the drug boom impacted Milwaukee with great intensity, as the amount of crack cocaine seized increased by 93 percent from 1993. Under Police Chief Philip Arreola, the station received 1,386,000 phone calls that year: with one of them looking for 20-year-old Mark Foster.

There weren’t any dental records or DNA records collected for Mark’s case until 2022. DNA records are used to match unidentified found bodies with missing people and can provide families with closure about their missing loved one. The department didn’t even have a picture of Mark until then either, as Sensitive Crime Division Officer Keyona Vines searched for pictures of long-term missing people to try to achieve tips or information regarding these people who haven’t been seen in decades. In hope, much like our project hopes, to bring these families answers.

---

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.