Tory Lowe: Milwaukee’s Advocate for Missing People

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 a group of his coworkers were allegedly waiting to jump him, tie him up, and throw him in the meat processing plant’s hog grinder. Lowe narrowly escaped and was able to get to his car, he said.

According to Lowe, when he got back to his apartment at around 2 a.m., Lowe ran up the stairs past his landlord’s window. His landlord thought it was strange that he had gotten home so early, but thought nothing of it until he saw several white men running up the stairs after him.

Lowe’s landlord was a retired veteran, so he grabbed his shotgun and ran upstairs to get these men off his property. Afterwards, Lowe and his landlord called the police.

Worthington was a very small town at the time, so Lowe’s landlord knew exactly who the men were. When the police arrived, Lowe and his landlord told them what had happened, and they made a report. According to Lowe, then they began putting Lowe in handcuffs.

“They might as well have killed me out there, that was the first time I ever experienced genuinely true evil and hatred,” said Lowe. “I called the police for help, and they came and arrested me.” 

Lowe filed a discrimination suit against the company, which was settled in 2007, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. If Lowe hadn’t narrowly escaped that night in 2005, he could have become a missing person, he believes.

Today Lowe, a talk radio host for 101.7 The Truth, has channeled his experiences into finding others who disappear, focusing on cases that don’t always attract significant news coverage.

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. 

Each year in the past decade, between 2,500 and 3,300 people have been reported missing. In 2024, 2,466 people have been reported missing from Milwaukee as of Oct. 15. 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, yet those are the cases 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, detectives from multiple police departments, and filed open records requests for each case.

Media Milwaukee invited Lowe to speak about missing people at UW-Milwaukee. Lowe also featured Media Milwaukee on his radio show, The Tory Lowe Show on 101.7 The Truth.

Lowe is a social activist from Milwaukee, who has helped over 250 families with missing loved ones find closure since 2011. In this project, Lowe has helped the families of Javeoni Buford, Larry Green, Carvell Jennings, Johnnie Patterson, and Alonzo Lamar.

“It’s good when you can get an outcome,” said Lowe. “You gotta realize that every time I pick up the phone, it’s extreme tragedy. It doesn’t stop, it’s back to back to back.” 

Lowe has also helped families experiencing evictions, homicide, housefires, human trafficking and led several protests in Milwaukee and Chicago. Lowe also spreads the word about missing people on his radio show.

“I’ve never gotten one penny to do it, and I take great pride in that,” said Lowe. “I’m over like $5 million in helping the community.”

According to Lowe, he gets about 15 calls a day from families all over Milwaukee who need his help with missing loved ones or other issues. Lowe has trouble remembering families he helped 

“When you get known for helping people nobody’s gonna help, that spreads faster than a California forest fire,” said Lowe.

Tory Lowe’s Definition of Missing

“When you picture missing, a lot of times you picture a white van,” said Lowe. “I’ve been out here 15 years, and I ain’t seen a white van yet. I’ve seen murder, human trafficking, but I’ve never seen a white van.” 

According to Lowe, missing in the African-American community is different than what it looks like in other communities. Lowe uses eight different scenarios to classify each missing case in the Black community.

The first scenario is a person who just doesn’t want to be at home. This could mean an adult who needs a break from their friends and family, or a child who runs away from home.

According to the National Runaway Safeline, out of the crisis contacts they received in 2023, 11% of Wisconsin youth ran away from their home, and 14% contacted them contemplating running away from home. 

NRS 2023 Crisis Services And Prevention Report

Milwaukee had the highest amount of crisis contacts in Wisconsin with 19%. Eighteen percent of crisis contacts in 2023 came from Black or African-American youth.

The second scenario is an elderly person who is diagnosed with Dementia or Alzheimer’s Disease, and wanders out of a group home. Carvell Jennings and Johnnie Patterson were both cases that fell under this classification.

According to the Wisconsin Department of Healthcare Services, Wisconsin has approximately 120,000 people living with Dementia, and that number is expected to double by 2040.

The third scenario is human trafficking, which Lowe says is on the rise in Milwaukee and Chicago. Lowe mentioned a 17-year-old Milwaukee girl who was allegedly lured to Chicago by sex traffickers. Lowe was able to find her three days after the family contacted him.

“She had a dog collar around her neck, and they had her barking like a dog in a cage,” alleged Lowe.

The fourth scenario involves youth who are being groomed online. Lowe says that this is the newest form of missing, and the most prevalent due to the ease of access to technology for youth nowadays. 

According to a study done by Childlight Global Child Safety Institute, as of May 2024, over 300 million children under the age of 18 have been affected by online child sexual exploitation and abuse in the last 12 months.

“A lot of people think that their children are safe because they’re sitting in the house with them, but they’re really not safe,” said Lowe. “You could be anywhere in the world on this phone, and anybody in the world can contact your loved one on this phone.” 

The fifth scenario is people who were murdered, but police have not found the body, and don’t have enough evidence to label it as murder.

According to crime data from the Milwaukee Police Department, there have been 128 homicides in Milwaukee this year so far.

The sixth scenario is an adult who relocates to a different state or country without telling any of their family or friends.

The seventh scenario is individuals with mental health issues and disabilities who have been taken advantage of.

The eighth scenario is missing Black men. Lowe separates Black men from the other scenarios because of how different missing in the Black community is.

“Oftentimes, when a Black man goes missing, somebody has a problem with them,” said Lowe.

How Does Lowe Find Missing People?

Lowe has a three-phase plan for finding missing people. Lowe was not willing to go into specifics, but he was willing to tell us the effects of each phase.

The first phase is to let the community know about the case through his social media and radio show. Lowe has over 100,000 followers across platforms.

Lowe says that in lighter situations, he can usually find missing people in two days after the first phase is complete, and the community is aware that he is investigating their case.

Lowe’s second phase is to spread flyers and conduct search parties in the areas the missing person was last seen, and in areas that Lowe receives through tips.

Lowe’s third phase is the ultimatum to his process. If Lowe gets to the third phase of his process, then it becomes increasingly likely that they are searching for a body.

How did Tory Lowe Begin Searching for Missing People?

Near the end of 2010, Lowe’s grandmother became sick, and he had to move back to Milwaukee. Soon after, Lowe began going from neighborhood to neighborhood and cleaning them up.

“I planted seeds in the community because I knew that my ultimate goal was to make helping other people popular,” said Lowe.

People began going to him for assistance with issues like Police Brutality and Child Protective Services. Around the time of the shooting of Trayvon Martin in Miami, Milwaukee was dealing with its own police issues. Lowe was fighting illegal strip-searching cases in Milwaukee’s 5th District.

“The one thing about Milwaukee is that at that time, we paid more attention to national ideas,” said Lowe. “Like Trayvon was huge, but nobody was talking about the illegal strip searching going on in the 5th district.”

Lowe organized a combined protest on March 12, 2011 for Trayvon Martin and the illegal strip searching cases in Milwaukee. They began at Old World 3rd Street, and walked to Locust Street and Doctor M.L.K. Jr Drive in the 5th district.

“I combined the two ideas because I knew everybody knew about Trayvon Martin, but I knew I had to stand for what was going on right here in the city of Milwaukee,” said Lowe.

When they arrived at the 5th district, people were confused because they didn’t know about the illegal strip-searching cases in Milwaukee. The police arrived, and several people left because they were only protesting about Trayvon Martin.

“I realized at that point, why are we not concerned about the things that are going on with the Black community here in Milwaukee that’s so egregious?” said Lowe.

Shortly after the protest, a woman called Lowe, asking for help with her missing 13-year-old daughter. She believed that her daughter was being trafficked, and that the police were not helping her.

“I was puzzled because, at that point, I wasn’t looking for people,” Lowe said. “But when she said the police weren’t going to do anything, there was no Amber Alert, and she feared her daughter was being human trafficked, I was like, ‘Okay, let me see what I can do.’”

Lowe quickly realized he could do a lot. He gathered the girl’s basic details, created a missing person flyer with her picture, and posted it on his Facebook, which had 50,000 followers at the time. The post immediately went viral, and the local news contacted Lowe to report on the case.

Lowe received a tip that the girl might be near 28th and Townsend, so he distributed flyers in that area. Due to the attention he brought to the case, the police got involved and found the girl, wearing a wig, with a changed name and hickeys on her neck. She was missing a total of four days and was found within two days of Lowe getting involved.

“So from then on if a mother called me and told me that her daughter was missing, I didn’t wait 24 hours to find her, because in 24 hours, she coulda been anywhere,” said Lowe.

Then a detective showed up at his house questioning him, because Lowe had done the detective’s job for him. He was questioning Tory like he was a suspect working with the perpetrators.

“The detectives would tell families to call me after they couldn’t do it in 48 hours,” said Lowe. “I think that I was changing how they do missing.”

Tory Lowe’s Background

“I remember, when I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut,” said Tory Lowe.

It was career day in 1986. Earlier that year, NASA sent Crista McAuliffe, a teacher from Concord, NH, into space as part of NASA’s Teacher in Space Project. Unfortunately, the space shuttle broke apart one minute and 13 seconds after launch, killing McAuliffe and all on board.

“That motivated me to be an astronaut, ‘cause I was like, ‘Man, that teacher was so brave,’” said Lowe.

Lowe began to draw a half-circle on his sheet of paper to represent the moon, and then he added an astronaut holding an American flag paying homage to the classic image of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin during the Apollo 11 mission.

“I didn’t know how to draw an astronaut, so it looked like a little snowman with a flag in his hand on the moon,” said Lowe.

Lowe’s first-grade teacher was coming around to look at everyone’s drawings. When she came to Lowe’s drawing, she had something to say that would change Lowe’s perspective for the rest of his life.

“I remember this like it was yesterday,” said Lowe. “The teacher came and saw that I was drawing that and she said, ‘Why don’t you be a serviceman like a policeman or a firefighter?’”

At the time, he didn’t realize that she had shifted his thinking. When he looks back on it as an adult, he realizes that she significantly narrowed his worldview at a young age. After that day, he drew policemen and firefighters every year on career day.

“Had she not done that, maybe I would have tried to get in touch with NASA or travel that route a little more,” said Lowe.

Lowe attended North Division High School in Milwaukee, and he was also a deacon at his local Pentecostal-Apostolic church.

According to a 2018 article by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, North Division is one of the lowest-performing high schools in the U.S.

Lowe said that during his freshman year, they had a class of about 300 students. Only about 55 students from that class graduated, and many of his friends were killed before they could graduate. He would hear about their deaths the next day on the morning announcements.

“School announcements were basically like an obituary,” said Lowe.

Lowe was a very good football player, but North Division’s team was not very good at the time. Lowe wanted to be a professional football player in the NFL, and his hero was Reggie White.

“Reggie White wrote a book called ‘The Minister of Defense,’ and I was like the deacon of defense,” said Lowe.

Lowe was also part of MATTA’s Teen Video Project in high school. They had their own show that would air on public access channel 14, and Lowe learned how to use video and audio equipment.

Lowe wanted to play for the Wisconsin Badgers, but he needed a 17 on his ACT. According to Lowe, he got a 13, and most of that was from guessing.

Tory’s counselor made a highlight reel of his best plays, and sent it to several colleges. Mike McCarthy, Iowa Lakes University’s defensive coach at the time, reached out to him and said that they could get enough grants so that he could afford going to college there.

“Mike McCarthy from Iowa Lakes came to the hood, and sat in grandma’s house,” said Lowe. “I’m sitting there thinking like, ‘I’m big time.'”

Culture Shock

Lowe was able to get a Pell grant and was accepted into Iowa Lakes University in Estherville, Iowa. When he arrived, he was the only Black person there.

Many of the friends he made were farmers, and they taught him how to golf, financial literacy, stock trading, and agriculture. They treated him like family, and he would help them on the farm.

“I was shoveling cow manure, and it stunk,” said Lowe. “They told me that’s the smell of money.”

Lowe also joined their football team and quickly became their star player. They won a national championship called the RC Cola Bowl, and Lowe was put in their hall of fame. Lowe still wears his championship ring to this day.

Lowe was well-versed in the technical side of broadcasting from his experience in the MATTA Teen Video Project, so he began helping broadcasting students with their projects. Then it was time for a new broadcasting president to be elected.

According to Lowe, there was another student named Kevin Tlam who knew a lot about the agriculture in Iowa, and had a voice for radio.

“He knew all of the Iowa stuff, so he was the best person from that area for the job,“ said Lowe. “It was my turn and I was like, ‘Vote for me, make history, Vote Tory Lowe for first Black broadcasting president.’”

Lowe won, and became broadcasting president at Iowa Lakes, because of how well-known he was with the other students. Kevin Tlam is now the Lead Adjunct Instructor of the Digital, Social & Broadcast Productions program at Iowa Lakes.

After he graduated from Iowa Lakes, he moved to Madison, and married his high school sweetheart. She was the smartest girl at North Division according to Lowe. She took extra classes at YMCA, and got a 23 on her ACT.

“She was extremely brilliant, and I was just shocked that I even had her,” said Lowe. “I wasn’t the brightest, but I had a lotta integrity.”

Lowe’s wife became pregnant, which meant Lowe had to give up on his dream of becoming a Wisconsin Badger. Lowe began studying online for a broadcasting degree. He eventually got a job at NBC 3.

Lowe’s wife gave birth to their son but soon fell ill with Lupus. Lowe and his wife moved to Milwaukee so she could finish her degree at UW-Milwaukee.

Lowe transferred to CBS 58 as a technical director, and he wrote scripts, built sets, and lighting. Working at CBS 58 showed him how the media covers crime from different communities.

“Every time they do white crime, they chalk it up to mental health, interview the family, and get pictures of them as a kid,” said Lowe. “When it’s Black crime, the first thing they do is get the mugshot, and he’s demonized right away.”

Lowe began to ask questions, and he continues to ask questions to this day. Lowe has become a news source for other media outlets, and he makes sure that they report his stories right.

“I learned a lotta game from being outside of Milwaukee, and that’s why I’m the king of talk radio,” said Lowe. “Because I’m gonna sit down with people, and understand who they are. I’m not gonna let the fear divide us.” 

The Present Day

In 2020, Lowe received a call from Kyle Wallace, director of content at Good Karma Brands. Wallace asked Lowe how he felt about doing radio.

“I was like what?” said Lowe. “When they called me, I thought it was a joke, because the Truth didn’t exist. I hung up the phone.”

Cherie Harris, the former general manager of Good Karma Brands, called Lowe back, and invited him to their office at the 3rd Street Market Hall. Lowe said that the only way he would do it, is if he could say what he wanted to say.

“Many times with Black men, they just want us to shut up, and that’s the sad truth,” said Lowe. “They don’t want you to say how you feel about your community.”

The Tory Lowe Show began in 2021, and since then Lowe has won nine Wisconsin Broadcasters Association Awards and 2024 Good Karma Brands Teammate of The Year.

“I think it’s powerful because at first I just didn’t believe that they would allow us to actually be vocal,” said Lowe. “I didn’t have to cut my hair or wear a suit, because when you’re authentic you don’t have to use gimmicks.”

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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.