Two weeks after two young siblings vanished without a trace in rural Nova Scotia, experts are pointing to anomalies in what they say is an unprecedented case that deviates from a typical missing children investigation.
Lilly Sullivan, 6, and brother Jack Sullivan, 4, have been missing since May 2. That’s when police received a 911 call reporting that they had wandered away from their home in Lansdowne Station, a sparsely populated area about 140 kilometres northeast of Halifax.
Nova Scotia RCMP then launched a search that included ground search and rescue officials, dog teams, drones and helicopters. But after six days of scouring the heavily wooded areas surrounding the home, there was no sign of the children and the search was called off.
Police have said they do not believe the children were abducted, but have not ruled out that the case is suspicious.
Michelle Jeanis, an associate professor in the criminal justice department at University of Louisiana at Lafayette, said the facts of the case and apparent lack of evidence makes it an “anomaly.”
“It doesn’t meet a lot of the normal criteria for what we would see for these types of cases,” said Jeanis, whose research areas include missing persons and juvenile justice.
“Usually there is evidence in some way that would suggest something nefarious has happened. It mirrors … those adult missing persons cases where we call it ‘quiet disappearances.’ There’s no evidence.”
A few details stand out to Jeanis as unusual, including the children’s absence from school that week.
The children’s stepfather, Daniel Martell, told CBC News the children were not in school on Thursday or Friday — the morning of the disappearance — due to illness. They also were not at school on Wednesday due to a professional development day.
“It could just be incredibly bad timing that they had 48 hours unaccounted for before the disappearance. But that’s just one of the things that stands out in my head,” she said.
FULL ARTICLE: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/experts-point-to-anomalies-in-unprecedented-case-of-missing-ns-children-1.7536905
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