Learning that Madeline and Emily Dorcich had been found was like a breath of fresh air until it wasn’t, because when you scratch beneath the surface something stinks! The girls were reported missing by their father after they failed to return home from a church event at San Jose’s Del Mar High School around 7:30 p.m. on Sunday, October 13, 2013.
By Tuesday, October 15, friends and other volunteers, including members of Mr. Dorcich’ church, were posting fliers throughout the South Bay. The girl’s father Chuck Dorcich said, “I think they are somewhere in the South Bay. I can’t imagine anywhere else they would be.”
Chuck Dorcich set up a Facebook page “Finding Madeline & Emily” to assist in the search and quickly attracted the public’s attention gaining more than 4,000 likes (including mine). It was renamed “Safe and Sound: Madeline and Emily” after they were recovered at approximately 1:30 p.m. on Wednesday, October 16. The page currently has 5,054 likes.
On Wednesday, October 16, the San Jose Police Department issued the following advisory: The two missing sisters (Madeline and Emily Dorcich) have been safely located and are with their biological mother. The entire incident was related to a child custody matter that will have to be resolved in family court. No criminal acts were committed and the San Jose Police Department will be closing the case and no further action will be taken.
My questions are pretty basic. If Madeline and Emily’s parents were engaged in a child custody battle, and Mrs. Dorcich had relocated to Pismo Beach, why did Mr. Dorcich say that he couldn’t imagine that they (the girls) would be anywhere else but the South Bay? Mr. Dorcich said that the ordeal gave him empathy for parents whose children have gone missing. “You assume the worst.”
If I were Mr. Dorcich I would have assumed that my ex-wife were somehow involved, or at least checked with her prior to reporting them missing to the police, freaking out the Bay Area, soliciting an army of volunteers to distribute 1,500 missing flyers, and posting a Facebook page that grabbed the attention and solicited the sympathy of thousands.
I will not go so far as to say that Mr. and Mrs. Dorcich used these lovely young girls as weapons against each other in a custody battle, but I will say that they need to re-evaluate their parenting skills and figure out their priorities because I don’t see that the best interest of the children were served.
As the parent of a child who really was missing, I do know what the parents of missing children go through. I also understand how families, friends, neighbors and communities are affected when the worst is feared. In this case there really wasn’t anything to fear. Police, media and community resources were expended to recover two girls who were never really missing in the first place and nobody is being held accountable.
We get calls like this all the time. We tell parents to ignore the John Walsh statistics of our nation being littered with the bodies of missing children; of the Ernie Allen speeches about how much danger there is with child abductions. The fact of the matter is that far more people are killed by lightning in the US each year than children abducted. But where’s the profit in lightning? So, people get hysterical whenever their teenagers, that they told the day before to get out if they didn’t like it where they were, go off the grid for a few hours. I say, sue the fear mongers. Sue NCMEC. They get between $40 million and $50 million a year. That’s a fact, not a stat. You want to see how many teenage girls can disappear in a second? Just yell “Justin Bieber” in any high school girls locker room. Then call the police, ’cause the Bieber’s gonna be the one that disappears… with the girls. And John Walsh and Ernie Allen can take that one to the bank.
You are right as always. And then the next time a child is missing, people may not be as enthusiastic, feeling taken in by these clowns. I’d be interested to know what happens in family court.
I wonder why the police investigators didn’t ask about the ex or at least say “when is the last timeMom saw them?”
San Jose PD did in fact contact do a thorough investigation in which both father and mother were interviewed. Thus SJPD closed the case as it was very clear the girls were not in danger and were in fact with their mother. Shame on both of the parents.