After vanishing without a trace for close to 10 months, a 15-year-old boy was safely found by police and returned home to his Ajax parents last week.
Just days before, his father Clayton gave an impassioned speech to a Black-led community meeting at a North York church, about what he said was the authorities’ indifference to an increasing number of families who have been urging police to help find their missing children.
“We’re hurting,” Clayton said during the Jan. 16 meeting at Toronto’s Revivaltime Tabernacle, attended by community members, child and youth experts, Toronto police and politicians.
“We feel like we have no other direction to go.”
Clayton’s son was one of six missing Black boys from the GTA who were included in a series of social media posts that have sparked outcry and prompted a string of community meetings in Brampton, Mississauga, Toronto and Pickering.
An online petition titled “Bring Them Home: Our Black Boys Are Missing” has amassed more than 4,400 signatures; the public outcry also caught the attention of police, with Toronto police Det. Shona Patterson, of the Missing Persons Unit, acknowledging that the campaign revealed “there was a lot of fear” in the community.
Black youth make up a disproportionate share of missing person cases between the ages of 12 and 17, Toronto police told the Star.
“While it is true that Black youth are reported missing more frequently than youth of other races, the rumour that many Black youths are currently unaccounted for is not true,” police said, noting that 96 per cent of missing persons reported to Toronto police are later found.
Both the boy’s father — who declined to share his full name out of fear for the well-being of his family — and Durham police have confirmed the boy was found but have declined to share details of his discovery, including where he was found.
Speaking to the Star, Clayton credited the community push for reviving police interest in his son’s case.
“I am very happy,” he said, adding that his boy is healthy but “obviously distraught.”
It was not the first time his son had gone missing for months. Clayton told the Star the boy earlier left home for several months in the summer of 2023; details of that incident were shared in a statement read out at the church meeting.
The boy was reported missing to Durham police, but his parents were in the dark until four months later, when he was among several people scooped up in a drug raid in Orillia, Clayton told the Star.
The incident left the boy’s parents with no idea how their son ended up in the company of adults a 90-minute drive north of his home.
In their statement, the boy’s family described their belief he had been recruited by the adults who are now charged with drug possession. They also wrote about a lack of concern from police, as if the case wasn’t “serious enough for urgent action.”
It was in March 2024 that Clayton’s son disappeared again, this time for nearly 10 months.
“My son was lured,” Clayton said.
Toronto has seen a stark spike in youth crime rates in 2024 — with almost every metric for
Mary Birdsell, a Toronto lawyer and the executive director of Justice for Children and Youth, told the Star that this kind of trafficking “is a huge issue.”
For young girls, trafficking often involves the sex trade, for boys, it’s more typically drugs, she said.
There are a host of complicated reasons why youth end up in these situations and find it difficult to get out, Birdsell added, noting that the predicament is especially complicated for racialized and Black boys “because we police them instead of caring for them.”
Why only some cases warrant an Amber Alert
Toronto police field roughly 10,000 missing person calls each year. In many such cases, Patterson said, someone is “either running away from something, or they’re running to something,” and uncovering those factors is key to where police start their search.
Cases where a youth is abducted are treated separately and typically warrant an Amber Alert, which is sent to phones and television screens across the province. These are only issued when law enforcement confirms a child under 18 has been abducted and is in immediate danger — but most cases don’t fit that criteria.
Last year, 328 youth between the ages of 12 and 17 years were reported missing to Toronto police. Of those, 230 involved Black youth, of whom 226 have been located, Patterson said.
Patterson emphasized that police allocate the same degree of urgency to all missing person reports, under the guidance of the Missing Persons Act. “We appropriately assess the risk that’s involved, and we respond to that risk,” she said.
At the Toronto meeting, Minister of Mental Health and Addictions Ya’ara Saks emphasized that every missing person’s story begins well before the day they disappear.
She said conversations continue about building a Black justice strategy, and that her ministry is looking into creating more community-led programming to give young people a helping hand before they’re in crisis — “Because we know, there are still too many barriers, not enough resources.”
Community advocate Shana McCalla, who was among the first to sound the alarm via social media, said that the community sees the urgency police show in some cases, but sense those involving Black youth are more often met with indifference.
Traffickers and predators exploit these gaps “knowing the system will not prioritize these children,” she said.
Why Black boys go missing
Durham police spokesperson Chris Bovie said the service welcomes the conversation around why “our young Black men are going missing,” but added that police will always be vocal in any case where they believe a youth has been abducted or “nefariously taken.”
It’s important, he said, to dispel the notion that there is some nefarious force abducting Black boys. “I want to be careful and not create panic in that standpoint,” he said, adding that officers looked into whether there was any connection to the six cases, but found none.
The public might see a missing person’s report and wonder why police aren’t issuing an Amber Alert, he noted. Behind the scenes, a system of checks and balances guides police decision-making on what warrants that level of response.
He also noted how the lessons from previous missing person cases have led to a formal process for investigators to follow — especially the independent review of Toronto police’s mishandling of the case of serial killer Bruce McArthur.
“We have to do a better job of educating and communicating,” he said.
Bruce McArthur’s murder victims “were often given less attention or priority than the cases
Const. Tyler Bell-Morena, of Peel police. He noted that a Peel youth was among the six boys at the centre of the social media outcry. He has already been located, and “nothing was suspicious” about the case, Bell-Morena said.
Still, “if the public is sounding an alarm, we have to respond to that,” he said. “Because the public sounded an alarm with Bruce McArthur and they were right.”
Every single missing person case goes through the same checklist protocol, which includes looking at the potential circumstances behind why they might be missing, the duration of time they have been missing, their last known whereabouts and the condition in which they were last seen.
Police are always looking to see if “there is a criminal element or is there a reason for us to be concerned.”
He added that officers also have to contend with what he calls “habitual runaways” — cases where police get dozens of calls from the same address about the same individual who is prone to leaving for days at a time without notice.
Gywneth Chapman, supervisor of Brampton’s Black Empowerment Unit, and David Mitchell, a senior adviser with the Youth Association for Academics, Athletics, and Character Education where behind the first online meeting, which included police speakers from several jurisdictions.
“We wanted the community to start talking, so we can figure this out,” Chapman said.
Mitchell, who also serves as chair of the Durham police diversity advisory committee, is calling for race-based data collection and research to facilitate a deeper dive into what’s happening among the Black youth who go missing. That work can identify “trends and issues that we can target” to shift the agenda toward prevention.
“It’s about focusing on the facts and minimizing speculation,” the former corrections officer said.
