Been not updating for a bit, sorry, domestic issues

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Basically the prepping for the bedbugs did not get done in time so we are still working on it and hope to have the exterminator come over next week sometime. It takes a lot of time to get your house prepared for the exterminator. He wants all furniture pulled back from the walls, all clothing washed and put in plastic bags, and every single book and DVD in the house checked for bedbugs and then put back on the shelves.

It is taking awhile. We didn’t know about the books and DVDs; they weren’t on the prep sheet and the first guy from the exterminating company I spoke to, I asked about the books and he said “leave them alone.” But the second guy, who came over to do the job, said the house wasn’t ready and he wasn’t willing to do it cause he could not guarantee results, and told me to check the books. I suppose most households don’t have quite as many books as ours does.

I can’t wait till this is over.

Wrote some more Wikipedia entries, these ones about entire groups of people who disappeared into the fog of the Syrian Civil War

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I wrote some more Wikipedia entries telling the stories of Westerner for Muslims who traveled to Syria to join the jihad, the Islamic State mostly.

Several months ago I made a post about the Wikipedia entries I’d written. Well, I’ve written some more I thought I’d share. All Islamic State/Syria related.:

  1. Mannan family terrorist cell: An entire British Bangladeshi family from Luton who joined ISIS together as a group of twelve people, aged 1 to 75. There is some evidence that the grandparents were coerced, and possibly that other members of the family could have been as well. None of them survived to tell their story.
  2. Sahra Ali Mehenni, at 17, began practicing Islam, started spending too much time online, ran away from her areligious home in small-town France and joined the Syrian jihad in 2014. She married an ISIL fighter she’d just met and told her family she didn’t to come home. After the fall of ISIL, Sahra repatriated to France in 2019.
  3. Dawood family terrorist cell: A young British Pakistani man aged 20 ran away from Bradford, England and went to ISIS in Syria. Over a year later, in 2014, his three sisters in their thirties followed him to Turkey, taking their nine children between 3 and 15 and leaving their devastated and bewildered husbands behind. Besides a few very dark Facebook posts were made in Syria by one of the children in 2016, but there’s been no indication of the Dawood famly’s whereabouts.
  4. Ameen family: In June 2014, Rehan Ameen left Bradford (the same home city as the Dawood family) and went to Turkey, and is thought to have gone thereafter to Syria. In October, Rehan’s brother Imran Ameen, Imran’s wife Farzana and their five kids left for Turkey also and are believed to have followed Rehan to Syria. But there’s been no confirmation of any of this apparently and not a peep out of the entire family group since.
  5. University of Medical Sciences and Technology terrorist cell: UMST is a school in Sudan which is recognized for offering an excellent medical education; their diploma was equivalent with a diploma from a medical school in the UK. In 2015, in three separate groups, 26 mostly British UMST students and recent graduates traveled to the territories of the Islamic State in Syria and in Libya. Many are known to have been subsequently killed; for many others their fate has not been recorded; only two are known to have made it out of Islamic State alive.

There’s no evidence the Ameen family and the Dawood family actually knew each other but they could have. Both families were members of Bradford’s Pakistani Muslim community, after all. They could be still alive: the women and kids in the Syrian detention camps, the men in prison. Some of the UMST people could be alive in the same camps/prisons.

I’d be interested to know people’s thoughts on the Mannan family, whether you guys believe the daughter kidnapped everybody or just her parents or if the entire family went willingly.

[Edited to add, on March 21]

I also wrote entries for:

  1. Amira Karroum, who traveled from her native Australia to join her jihaidist husband in Syria. He was with Jabhat Al Nusra, another jihadist group. (The current leader of Syria, Ahmed al-Sharaa, was the emir of Jabhat Al Nusra. The group later merged with some other jihadists militias to form Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, which overthrew the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in 2024.) Amira and her husband were killed by ISIS shortly after she arrived in Syria. (I only wrote her entry, not all the other entries I linked to explaining the Syrian situation.)
  2. Guy Staines, Amira Karroum’s brother-in-law, who converted to Islam while in prison for murder, joined the Syrian jihad after Amira’s death and is reported to have been killed in an airstrike in April or May 2017. Now other Wikipedians are arguing whether to delete Guy’s article on notability grounds. Feel free to join in if you have an account. I wouldn’t be devastated if the article got deleted, he’s not the most well known jihadi, but I think he’s notable enough.

MP of the week: Layla Adkins

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This week’s featured missing person is Layla Dawne Adkins, a 32-year-old white woman last seen in Leeds, Alabama on November 13, 2008. She has blonde hair, blue eyes, pierced ears and a tattoo on her breast, and may use the last name Blizzard. She’s quite tall and was very thin: 5’11 and only 120 pounds.

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She was living with her boyfriend disappeared, and didn’t have custody of her two daughters, and as a result months passed before she was reported missing. It’s not clear whether she left on her own or not. Her boyfriend says she did, with a man from Texas, but the Texas man he directed the cops to said he hadn’t seen Adkins in years.

Foul play is a possibility. If still alive, Layla Adkins would be about 50 years old today.

Hope everyone is doing okay

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I just thought I’d post a little update saying I’m doing pretty well at the moment. Today I got a new (to me) car. It’s a Buick Park Avenue, basically a slightly fancier version of the Buick LeSabre I totaled in December. Though 24 years old it still drives fine. I have a brother who is a car mechanic and he was the one who recommended the car to me. It’s very convenient to have a mechanic in the family.

The last few days I’ve been prepping the house for an exterminator to come on Monday. For the better part of a year we’ve been battling bedbugs. We did everything the internet said, spread diatomaceous earth, replaced our sofas and armchair, threw out the headboard of our bed, etc., but they kept coming back. What bothered me the most was not the bites but the waste they leave on our bedding, waste that leaves stains that can’t be washed out. Finally we gave up and have summoned professional help. I can’t wait till the little bastards are all gone. Once I’m confident the house is no longer infested, I’m going to replace all the sheets and pillowcases with new ones that don’t have dark spots all over them.

It is a bit of a production, getting the house prepped for this. You have to empty your closets and dressers and nightstands etc and wash all your clothes and things in 120-degree water and put them in plastic bags, knotted. I have gone and put the clothes I can’t wash (wool, silk etc) in the freezer with hopes that if they are infested, that’ll take care of it. They will come to my house, put poison everywhere, then come back in a few weeks and do the same thing again to take care of any bugs that survive the first round. I’m taking the opportunity, in prepping the house, to also de-clutter stuff. I have way too many clothes. Fortunately the exterminator told me my books could stay on the bookshelves; otherwise I don’t know what I would have done with them.

You can’t be in the house or have any pets there during the treatment, so I’ve arranged to put Patrick in doggy day care on Monday and I’m going to take the cats and go visit my mother while the exterminators are doing their thing. Patrick has never attended this doggy day care before so they want him come over to the place tomorrow to do a “temperament test” to make sure he gets along with the other dogs. Patrick loves playing with other dogs so I expect he’ll pass with flying colors.

In April, Michael and I will be going to Wisconsin to the missing persons event that I attend annually. Readers might recall that we tried to go last year, only to have our vehicle’s transmission give out on the way up, which sucked. This year if I get permission I might borrow my dad’s car, switch ours out for his, for the trip. Dad’s car is newer, and therefore less likely to die on us. Also it almost certainly gets better gas mileage and gas prices are through the roof right now. I really look forward to these events cause I get to interact with others who share my interest in missing persons.

All the news is terrible but I’m trying to keep my chin up and do my website work and read books rather than doomscroll. I read a fascinating memoir by a lady who, as a student in New York City in the 1960s, met and married an Afghan man and followed him back to Afghanistan when his visa expired, which of course turned out to be a massive mistake. She had no idea what Afghanistan was like and her husband did not tell her beforehand. On top of it being, well, Afghanistan, her in-laws whom she had to live with were not very welcoming. This woman is reasonably sure her mother-in-law was trying to kill her. The MIL was not happy that her son had married outside his culture and his faith. The author got umpteen bouts of dysentery before she found out her MIL had instructed the servants to stop boiling her drinking water and stop washing her produce in boiled water. Her MIL had to have known what the result of that would be; she was basically poisoning this poor woman. What saved her was getting hepatitis, which nearly killed her, but which gave her an excuse to leave Afghanistan and return to the US “temporarily, for medical treatment”. She had the good sense not to come back.

MP of the week: Jeffery McFry

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This week’s featured missing person is Jeffery Scott McFry, a 23-year-old white man with dark brown shoulder-length hair and blue eyes who was last seen in Anniston, Alabama on September 5, 1990. He was wearing a green shirt, camouflage overalls and brown boots.

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They are reasonable sure what happened to McFry, a drug-related homicide. A man was even convicted of ordering his death and of having a role in several other killings. But the witnesses in McFry’s case later recanted their testimony, and there is another suspect in his case who was convicted of killing another person.

It’s been 35 1/2 years and they have never found McFry. And marijuana, the drug he was involved with, is legal in many states now.

Using artificial intelligence to find missing persons by tattoos

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Yesterday I read this interesting article about the use of AI to find missing persons in Mexico. (There are soooo many missing persons in Mexico. Cause of cartels, etc.) The AI scans dead bodies and identifies their tattoos, saving humans the trouble. And then tattoos can be matched to missing persons.

I admit to being extremely skeptical of the benefits of AI generally (it certainly isn’t the cure-all that tech companies make it out to be) but this sounds like it could be a good use for it.

Only, however, if the missing person’s tattoos are recorded accurately. And I know they often are not.

There’s one guy I put up recently, whom CDOJ says has a tattoo of “Susan” on his chest. Well, his Charley Project page has a photo of his bare chest taken from Facebook, and the tattoo says “Susie” not “Susan”. An easy mistake to make, but one which could keep him from being identified. I recall another case where I had two different, conflicting text descriptions of a missing guy’s tattoo, and when I tracked down a photo of the tattoo in question, it turned out both of the descriptions were wrong. If the tattoo is not on your own body, and particularly if it’s in a place most people don’t see often cause it’s covered by clothing, the particulars of the image might not be recalled correctly.

MP of the week: Yamaira Montes-Gonzalez

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This week’s featured missing person is Yamaira Vivivan Montes-Gonzalez, who disappeared from Yabucoa, Puerto Rico on November 14, 2000. Yamaira was 5’7 and 126 pounds at the time of her disappearance, but as she was only fourteen she might have grown taller since then. She’s Hispanic, with brown hair and brown eyes, but her hair was dyed blonde at the time of her disappearance.

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Very little information is available in Yamaira’s case. She might be the first missing person of the week from Puerto Rico; I’m not sure. She was last seen walking to the school bus, wearing her uniform which consisted of a plaid skirt and a white polo shirt.

If still alive she’d be 39 years old today.

Been through all the past updates and archived everything

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So yesterday I finally got through all the Charley Project updates back to 2018 (which is when the site got redesigned; the update pages older than that are no longer online) and I’ve archived them all and purged like 600 cases.

Now I’ve got to see where to start next. Maybe in the 1990s?

While looking to verify all the cases I found a lot of more stuff to post. That’ll be the updates for the next several days.

MP of the week: Casey Morgan

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This week’s featured missing person is Casey Gene Morgan, a 39-year-old man who was last seen after he left the Waffle House where he worked in Marshall, Texas at 4:30 a.m. on August 8, 1997. Casey has scars on both his legs, an eagle tattoo on his back and a panther tattoo on his arm. He’s white, with brown hair and green eyes.

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Casey’s truck was found abandoned in a wooded area after his disappearance, with bullets scattered on the floor. His rifle was missing.

If still alive, Casey Morgan would be 68 years old today.

Still archiving and purging cases

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So I’m still making my way back through the updates and now I’m back to August 2019. I have also purged over 500 cases from the database. The Charley Project was at over 17,000 cases and now we are down to 16,552. If you’ve noticed an influx in late resolved cases in my most recent site updates, it’s resolutions I’m discovering as I’m checking each casefile to see if any changes have happened.

I’m glad I’m getting rid of those outdated cases as I don’t want to cause problems for any of these no-longer-missing people in their day to day lives. I’m also glad to get the opportunity to fix typos etc as I go along, including all those capitalized “white”s.

I haven’t gotten much reading or any of my other usual things done because I’ve been so focused on this archive/purge project. Still haven’t finished the book about Eliphaz Laki’s murder that I mentioned.