Moms of the Missing by Steffen Hou

Author:Steffen Hou
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 2019-08-08T17:43:27+00:00

FAMILY FIRST

Jo Ann tried to convince the police that her daughter had been taken, because Ali’s makeup, purse, clothes, money, and phone charger were still in the house—everyday stuff a runaway teenager would normally bring with them when they left. And when the family checked Ali’s phone records they were even more certain a crime had been committed. Ali constantly spoke on her phone, and she sent thousands of texts every month. But ever since she got off the school bus her phone has not been used except for a text she sent ten minutes later asking her friend, Jay, to come over to her house later that afternoon.

Jo Ann says that in spite of all these facts law enforcement took several weeks before acknowledging that Ali had not run away but was more likely the victim of a crime. When the police department finally accepted this conclusion, the case was escalated to the homicide unit, with the promise of using more resources to find Ali.

Although the police were finally showing the urgency Jo Ann had been hoping for from the beginning, the escalation of the case also meant the homicide detectives now started directing their investigation towards Ali’s family. Her brother Mason and the father John were both taken to the station for questioning. Jo Ann says the police kept her son in the interrogation room for hours and that they accused him of getting into an argument with Ali that escalated into a fight resulting in him killing his little sister.

“They tried to force Mason to confess. It really scared him. He was nineteen years old and just a teenager. It scarred his heart, being accused of having killed his sister. Afterwards he would not talk about it, but you could see the pain in his eyes. Today, it is still very emotional for him to talk about, because it traumatises you, being accused of having killed a person you love deeply,” Jo Ann says. She describes the children as growing up in a close-knit family where the siblings were each other’s best friends.

Ali constantly wanted to be with her brother. Jo Ann recalls how she would rather play with Mason’s action figures than with her own Barbie dolls.

“Like all siblings they had their rivalry. ‘Mom, he looked at me’ or ‘Mom, she’s playing with my toys’. That type [of thing]. But their love for each other was so obvious and deep,” Jo Ann recalls.

A few years after Ali’s disappearance, Mason moved to Seattle, Washington. There were too many sad memories connected with the town of Spring, Texas.

“I still get upset when I think about how law enforcement treated this innocent young man,” Jo Ann says.

Her son was not the only family member being questioned by detectives. The police department also interrogated Ali’s father, John. Before the investigators cleared him as a suspect, the father had to take a polygraph test to prove he did not kill his own daughter.

The interrogation took a toll on the entire family.

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