Cover Story: Losing Hanna, Part II

Editor’s note: This is the second installment in a two-part series. Part I can be viewed here. For a hyperlinked version of this article with notes on sourcing, click here.</
Los Angeles, Calif., Dec. 16, 2003</
She says her name is Denise Jones.</
Police arrest her at dusk. She’s just outside Inglewood near the Hollywood Park Race Track, where mission-style homes are painted peach and avocado, and meticulous topiaries strike a discordant note against burglar bars on the windows.</
The commercial strip near 80th Street is desolate. Faded lettering on sun-bleached signs hint at businesses that long ago moved on: a check casher, a grocery, a liquor store, a church.</
The only traces of California glamour pierce the sky; tall palms are silhouetted against every horizon.</
Police book her for loitering, with intent to commit prostitution. She has no ID. She says her birth date is March 16, 1985. That would make her 18.</
At the jail, she’s fingerprinted. Police run the prints through a database to see if anything comes up a match. Nothing does.</
They take her mug shot. She’s thinner than she was three months ago, which makes her face even more heart-shaped. Her long hair is loose and wild and dyed a deep red. She still lowers her chin the way she always does for photos, looking up with cloudy blue eyes.</
But this time, there’s no hint of a smile. Her lips are pressed together. She looks determined and defiant.</
With so little to go on, jail officials have no choice. They let her go.</
Riverdale, Ga., early January 2004</
Otis Jefferson has a funny feeling about the phone call. The connection is bad. He doesn’t hear most of what she says. But he’s positive it is Hanna.</
All he is able make out through the static is, “Baby, I’m OK.”</
Otis is the only person who’s heard from Hanna Montessori regularly since the 15-year-old girl ran away from a Cobb County children’s shelter in September. Her grandmother and her uncle’s girlfriend believe Hanna has been calling them over the past couple of months, too. But whoever it was wouldn’t say anything. The line stayed quiet while the two women pleaded for a word, anything. Once, right before the click, someone said, “I love y’all.”</
Hanna did talk on the phone to her older brother Derek and her friend Melody Richards in Maine. But she didn’t say much. Melody didn’t even know Hanna had run away. Hanna only told her brother that she wasn’t coming home until she turned 18. No one was going to tell her what to do anymore.</
From the time she ran, Hanna only spoke for real to Otis. She told him she was in California. She said she was hanging out with friends, but she only described one. He was “some dude named Smurf” she’d met in Georgia. She said he drove her across the country.</
Otis told Hanna’s grandmother that she was in California. Her grandmother, in turn, told the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services, which had taken custody of Hanna a month before she disappeared.</
Otis always knew how Hanna felt about him. She was never shy about saying so. She admired him. He tried to stay out of trouble. He was focused on making a career for himself in the music industry. He could rap or sing R&B, and he could write lyrics for both.</
But Hanna seemed to have a hard time grasping his feelings toward her. He could only think of her like a little sister. After all, he’s five years older.</
Now, he can’t stop worrying. He expects her to call back, to finish what she was trying to say. But she doesn’t.</
Old Orchard Beach, Maine, March 16, 2004</
Hanna’s not the type to let to her 16th birthday go by without a word. Which is why her father and stepmother are wondering, Why hasn’t anyone heard from her in two months now?

Despite the anger she barely suppresses toward her parents, despite the blame she places on their divorce five years back, despite the meltdown of a day when she was placed in state custody after claiming her mother’s boyfriend had touched her inappropriately - despite all that, she can’t have given up trying to get her parents’ attention.</
So why wouldn’t she call to remind someone, anyone, that they ought to be missing her on her birthday?</
Hanna’s stepmother, Christine Montessori, keeps a scrapbook on the missing girl. Most of the pictures are from Hanna’s stay with them last summer in Maine.</
She was a handful. She’s always been a handful. She snuck out, drank, picked fights.</
Christine, who hadn’t yet married Hanna’s father at the time, wasn’t exactly easy on the girl. She hoped Hanna would respond to some hard rules.</
That didn’t work. Not even midway through July, Hanna was put on a Greyhound and sent back to her mother in Georgia.</
But Hanna didn’t seem to hold a grudge. She even wrote Christine a few weeks later to wish her a happy birthday. Sealed under the plastic on a page of Christine’s scrapbook is the letter Hanna sent a few weeks after she got back to Georgia.</
“Hey Birthday Girl!” Hanna dots the exclamation point with a heart. “How are you doing? I’m okay I guess.”</
She thanks Christine for some photos. “I adore them. ... Congrats on the marriage. But I never knew until you wrote me. Nobody ever told me. It was a big shock. But I’m happy for y’all. I’m sorry I can’t write that much. It’s only because I have to send this off today. ... Anyways, I’m proud of my father for not smoking and I love him very much. Please let him know that. Give Dylan a kiss and a hug for me, okay?”</
Christine can’t understand how everything could seem so OK in the letter when so much was about to go down. A few weeks later, Hanna called police on her mother and her mother’s boyfriend, and she spent the next six weeks in three different group homes. Since she ran away from one home in September, nobody has been able to find her.</
Now, on Hanna’s birthday, Christine wants to tell her about the newest member of the family, Hanna’s little half-sister, Heidi. Christine gave birth Jan. 12, 2004, just a few days after Hanna’s last call to Otis.</
All of this - Hanna’s 16th birthday, the long stretch of silence, her letter - is making Christine crazy. Where is Hanna? Why hasn’t she called?</
Christine decides to do something for Hanna on her birthday. She’s going to make sure the authorities are doing everything they can to find her.</
Christine does some research on how runaways are tracked down. She finds a phone number, 800-THE-LOST, for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The center keeps a database on runaways. Police and child-welfare agencies can feed information - names, heights, weights, birth dates and, occasionally, fingerprints - into the database.</
Christine has her husband call the number.</
Phillip Montessori tells the woman who answers that he’s just checking to make sure the center has all the information it needs regarding his daughter, Hanna, born March 16, in 1988.</
The woman’s answer shocks Phillip and Christine: The database has no information on the girl.</
It’s mind-boggling. It only takes a phone call to submit a runaway’s info to the center. Christine had assumed the state of Georgia was doing everything it could to find her.</
Christine calls the one person she believes can help, Hanna’s DFACS case manager in Georgia. She leaves Amanda Joblinske an angry message.</
On March 18, 2004, Amanda jots down a note in a logbook that’s part of Hanna’s file: “Message from Christine Montessori, Hanna’s step mother. She said a national missing persons report has not been done yet and Hanna has been missing for six months now. She said she will call [my] supervisor if [I don’t] call her back today.”</
Georgia, March 23-April 7, 2004</
Amanda Joblinske pulls up to a trailer overlooking a muddy cove on Jackson Lake, about 50 miles southeast of Atlanta.</
Hanna’s grandmother, Maxine Coffland, and her second husband recently moved there from a ranch house on a quiet street in Riverdale. It was the couple’s dream to live on the water. They named their trailer “Palm Retreat,” though they also referred to it, affectionately, as “the Dump.” They built a brick path down to the dock, where two ornate black lampposts set Palm Retreat apart among the neighbors’ ramshackle houses.</
Maxine and her husband keep a bunch of ducks, raised from the time they were hatchlings. The walls inside are hung with prints of mallards. Duck figurines sit on bookshelves and end tables. A paddle carved with the words “Welcome to Our Home” is nailed to the wall near the front door.

Palm Retreat is the hub of Maxine’s sprawling family, and Maxine - petite, freckled, a force to be reckoned with - is the family’s reigning matriarch. For months, she’s done her best to keep her family from falling apart, and to keep everyone optimistic about finding Hanna.</
Since December, Maxine’s daughter, Cheryl Montagu, and Cheryl’s youngest son have been living at Palm Retreat, too. The court-ordered plan to reunite Cheryl and Hanna - once Hanna is found - requires that Cheryl live apart from her boyfriend. And since Cheryl can’t afford to live on a single income, despite waiting tables at both a Waffle House and an IHOP, she moved in with Maxine. The plan also mandates that Cheryl regularly check in with Amanda.</
Now, as Amanda comes to visit, Cheryl’s convinced she can do a better job watching out for Hanna than DFACS is doing. Amanda and Cheryl don’t get along, so Amanda has asked Chris Sheldon, another DFACS caseworker, to meet her at the trailer.</
The four women - the DFACS workers, Maxine and Cheryl - sit around the coffee table in the trailer’s living room. The topic quickly turns to Cheryl’s frustration with a system that can’t locate her daughter. Cheryl complains that DFACS is making her go through psychological testing and parenting classes on her own dime, while the agency itself, not she, is the one who lost her daughter.</
“She was in y’all’s custody, in state custody,” Cheryl says, not for the first time. “How did she slip away?”</
Cheryl argues that Hanna never should have been placed in another group home after she ran away from DFACS the first time. Security at those facilities isn’t tight enough. She tells Amanda that Hanna should have been sent to boot camp, where she would have been safe.</
“I don’t know whether you’ve lost a child or have had a child missing,” Cheryl says, her voice starting to waver. “I don’t know whether my child is dead or alive, if she is hungry, if she has clothes on her back, if she is living on the streets.”</
She bursts into tears. Tears start to well up in Chris’ and Amanda’s eyes.</
“I just want my grandbaby back,” Maxine tells them, choking back her own sobs.</
“Do you know where we can find her?” Amanda asks. “I just want to find her.”</
“All we know,” Maxine says, repeating information she already shared with Amanda three months earlier, “is she might be in California.”</
When Amanda gets back to the DFACS office, she returns the call from Christine in Maine. Nearly a week has passed since Hanna’s stepmother called with the news that Hanna’s profile needed to be entered into the national missing children’s database.</
Now, Christine tells Amanda that to list Hanna as a missing child, all DFACS has to do is give the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children the police report number associated with Hanna’s case. DFACS has the number on file. Amanda says she’ll talk to a supervisor to find out if she can hand over the information.</
Nine days later, Amanda e-mails her supervisor, Susan Waddell: “I received a call from Hanna Montessori’s step mother saying that we did not file missing persons on Hanna nationally. ... What should I do? She wants me to call ... and give them the case number filed by the police.”</
The supervisor brings up the issue with another DFACS official. A month passes. Nothing happens. DFACS doesn’t send Hanna’s information to the database. Christine doesn’t hear back from Amanda.</
Soon, however, Amanda and others at DFACS will learn there’s nothing more they can do for Hanna.</
Santa Ana, Calif., Jan. 19, 2004</
Forty miles south of Los Angeles, the sun has just set over Morse Drive. The man who lives in the house with the tall white fence is standing in his driveway. He sees a gray pickup truck turn onto the street, then hears its passenger-side door open. Something heavy drops to the ground.</
The truck turns around in the cul-de-sac. It starts back up the street. Its headlights cut through the dark, and the man sees something in the light: a girl.</
She’s wearing jeans, he thinks, and a white shirt. She’s lying on her side, stretched out, her cheek pressed into the pebbled blacktop. She’s facing the man.</
He notices the blood.</
Everything is happening fast. Thoughts race through his head. For a second, he considers grabbing a 2x4 off the bed of his own pickup, running into the street and throwing it at the truck, which is slowly making its getaway.</
But if the driver hurt that girl, he might not think twice about hurting someone else.</
Instead, the man runs inside his house, where his wife and kids are getting ready to go with him to the store. He calls 911.</
“Is she moving?” the dispatcher asks.</
“I don’t see her moving.”</
“Is she alive?”</
“I’m not sure.”</
“Can you go check?”</
“You know what? Just send everybody out here.”</
Within minutes, a fire truck, an ambulance and a police car pull onto Morse Drive. The man stands in his yard. He notices that the girl has moved. She’s now curled into a fetal position. That means she’s still alive.</
The ambulance drives her a couple of miles to an Orange County hospital.</
Santa Ana police canvass the neighborhood but generate no leads. No one seems to know the girl. Police do get one break early on: Investigators match her fingerprints to those taken a month earlier, when she was arrested in Los Angeles. But she gave L.A. police a fake name. Santa Ana authorities also believe she’s younger than 18, the age she gave at the time of her arrest.

What’s even weirder is that if she’s missing, no one seems to be looking for her. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has no profile that fits her. It’s unusual for no relatives to be looking for a missing teenager.</
The police appeal to local TV stations and newspapers, asking that they circulate a picture of the girl, the mug shot taken when she was arrested in L.A. Santa Ana Police Investigator Jaime Rodriguez enters her stats - 5-foot-5, 120 pounds, blue eyes, dyed red hair (natural color most likely brown), about 16 years old - into the missing children’s website.</
Then, Rodriguez waits.</
Georgia, April 13, 2004</
There is an urgent message on Amanda’s answering machine at DFACS. Detective Brian Lee, with the sheriff’s department in neighboring Fayette County, says to call him.</
Amanda dials his number. The detective tells her he knows where Hanna Montessori is. Amanda asks if Fayette County has her.</
Not exactly, he answers. She’s in California.</
Lee tells Amanda that police out in Santa Ana finally got a tip in the case of an unidentified teenager. A woman whom police described as “another prostitute” came forward and said she knew the girl in the picture that was making the rounds on TV and in the papers. She didn’t know the girl’s name, but recalled her saying she was from a town in Georgia with a name like “Peachtree.”</
The woman also told police that the girl talked often about a boy named Otis.</
Amanda says she knows Otis. Hanna talked about him as if he was her boyfriend, and Amanda called him several times after Hanna ran away in September, thinking Hanna would have run to him. But she didn’t.</
Lee then explains to Amanda how Rodriguez, with the Santa Ana Police Department, searched a list of Georgia towns and found one called Peachtree City, in Fayette County. Rodriguez called the Fayette Sheriff’s Department and explained that he was trying to find the family of an unidentified girl who might be from around there. But all he had to go on was a mug shot. Could a deputy bring the photo, which is now posted on the website for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, around to the local high schools to see if anyone recognized her?</
Lee tried the high schools first. No luck.</
Then he tried group homes, the ones that contract with DFACs. At a Fayette County facility called Johnson Home, one of the girls happened to recognize the picture. She had roomed briefly with the girl in the photo, at a shelter up in Cobb County called Another Chance. She told Lee the girl’s name was Hanna.</
Staff members at Another Chance gave Lee the full name - Hanna Montessori - and told him to call her DFACS case manager, Amanda.</
So here he is, calling Amanda to ask for any phone numbers she might have. He needs to contact Hanna’s family.</
Old Orchard Beach, Maine, April 13, 2004</
It’s after 11 p.m. Hanna’s older brother Derek, who lives with their dad in Maine, is checking the website for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to see if his sister’s profile has finally made it on there.</
Earlier that day, his stepmother, Christine, got a call from a Detective Lee down in Georgia. He said police in Santa Ana, Calif., needed to talk to her husband. Phillip Montessori was working a shift as a security guard, and Christine couldn’t reach him right then. By the time he got home, Santa Ana police weren’t answering the phone.</
Hanna’s brother had looked for his sister on the missing children’s website before, but there was nothing under her name. This time, however, he has more information: Santa Ana, the city where the police called from.</
He starts searching for missing girls in Santa Ana. Several photos pop up. He pauses on one of them.</
The girl’s lips are tightened, making her look harder than Hanna ever looked. And she has red hair - the last time he saw Hanna, her hair was dirty blond. But it’s definitely her.</
Her blue eyes give her away.</
Georgia, April 2004</
It’s almost midnight. The phone rings in Maxine’s trailer. Cheryl answers.</
She runs into Maxine’s bedroom.</
“She’s dead,” Cheryl screams. “Oh my god, my baby’s dead.”</
Maxine grabs the phone.</
“Are you sure?” she asks. Hanna’s father is on the other end.</
“Yes,” he says, crying. “We have a picture of Hanna on the Internet. I know those blue eyes. That’s Hanna. That’s our Hanna.”</
Under the photo is the word “Deceased.”</
Nobody sleeps that night. In the days that follow, Maxine tells herself that it is just a dream ... that they need to keep looking for Hanna.</
The next day, Rodriguez and Cheryl talk on the phone. He says Hanna died from massive head injuries on Jan. 19, the night someone dumped her on Morse Drive.</
For almost three months, her body has been lying in a California morgue, tagged “Jane Doe.” Police are treating her death as a homicide. They haven’t yet identified a suspect.</
Rodriguez needs Cheryl to go to the local sheriff’s department and have the inside of her mouth scraped for a DNA sample. Police need to compare Cheryl’s DNA to that of the girl. They need to be sure it’s her daughter.</
Before the results are final, Rodriguez calls Maxine’s house looking for Cheryl. She’s not home. So he asks Maxine how well she knows her granddaughter - or, more specifically, how well she knows her granddaughter’s body.</
“Does she have any identifying traits?” he asks.</
“She has hammertoes on both feet,” she tells him. Hanna inherited the funny second toes from Maxine.</
“What about birthmarks?”</
“Yes,” Maxine says. “On her inner thigh.”</
“Does she have any scars on her face?”</
Maxine thinks about that one. And she remembers. Hanna has a chicken pox scar on her forehead.</
The detective says he’s 99 percent sure. They have Hanna.</
April 2004-April 2005</
Within days, Hanna’s name crops up in newspapers as far away as Portland, Maine; Toronto, Canada; and London, England. Much is made of the fact that her great-great-grandmother was Maria Montessori, the founder of the schools by the same name. Montessori schools teach the importance of autonomy, free thinking, and challenging authority. The irony - and the news peg - is obvious.</
“Slain girl a Montessori descendant.”</
“Girl with a famous name dies far away, a Jane Doe.”</
“But for her famous family name, 15-year-old Hanna Montessori would have lived and died in obscurity, her brutal murder another teen runaway statistic.”</
On Fox News, Greta Van Susteren interviews Hanna’s father. Local TV crews show up at Maxine’s trailer.</
Then, just as quickly as the media blitz arrives, it’s gone. Maxine and the rest of the family are left looking for answers.</
Wasn’t it DFACS’ responsibility to watch out for Hanna - to watch out for her better than her family could? Wasn’t that the point of taking her away in the first place?</
The way Maxine sees it, the agency had three chances to save her granddaughter.</
The first came Aug. 21, 2003. Over dinner, Hanna told a DFACS social worker that she intended to run away from the shelter. The next day, she did. She skipped out on the bus that was supposed to take her from high school back to the shelter. Had the agency paid closer attention to Hanna’s claim, she might not have been able to run that first time - and might have been dissuaded from running again.</
With the help of her family, who tracked her down through friends, police picked up Hanna a couple of days later. But even after that escape, DFACS placed no additional restrictions on her. The agency simply says it doesn’t pay any special attention to wards of the state who’ve run away. That was the second chance to save her. A month later, Hanna ran away again, the same way she did before. But this time, nobody could find her.</
The last chance came after she ran away the second time, when the agency could have made certain that Hanna’s info had been sent to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (what’s more, Cobb County police, who investigated Hanna’s case, didn’t submit Hanna’s info to the center’s database, either). If DFACS officials had checked, they could have made sure the center knew that Hanna was missing - and that she had been fingerprinted by the Henry County Sheriff’s Department after she ran the first time.</
Those fingerprints would have been useful had they been entered into either the missing children’s database or the FBI’s database. In fact, it’s likely that Hanna would’ve been identified when she was arrested in L.A., in which case she would have been sent back to Georgia. Alive.</
Three warnings. Three chances to save her. Three missed opportunities.</
It was Hanna’s stepmother - not DFACS or Cobb police - who figured out that more could’ve been done to save Hanna. Although Christine was two months late in her realization, identifying Hanna at that point (rather than a month later) might have helped Santa Ana police with their homicide case. Instead, police didn’t know for three months who Hanna was, where she came from and whom she might have been hanging out with in California.</
Earlier this year, more than a year after Hanna was killed, Santa Ana police arrested a suspect in her murder. But in March, the district attorney in Orange County decided there wasn’t enough evidence to indict the man, whose name is being withheld while police try to contact additional witnesses.</
“Are we trying to bring the case back with more evidence?” Santa Ana Police Sgt. Lorenzo Carillo said in March. “Yes, absolutely.”</
DFACS, January-July 2005</
In a January interview with CL, DFACS spokesman Bryan Toussaint contended that even though Hanna had been in DFACS’ custody when she disappeared, once she was gone, she wasn’t the agency’s responsibility anymore.</
“DFACS was acting under the guise that, once we notified the police that she was missing, it’s pretty much up to the police department to handle it,” says Toussaint, who is no longer with the agency. “Now, should DFACS have maybe made an initial call [to the Center for Missing and Exploited Children]? I personally can’t say. But as far as policy is concerned, our position is that ... it’s up to law enforcement to handle it. If the family had any kind of inkling she was in California ... they really should have stepped up to the plate and notified law enforcement.”</
DFACS documents reviewed by CL show that Hanna’s family members informed the agency on at least three occasions that they believed Hanna was in California. And nothing in more than 300 pages of documents obtained through the state Open Records Act indicate DFACS told the family that finding Hanna was now their responsibility. According to the documents, neither did DFACS point Hanna’s family to Cobb County police, who were investigating her disappearance.

CL attempted to clarify details of Hanna’s case, as well as DFACS’ general practices regarding children who are lost while in the agency’s custody. But between February and July 2005, repeated phone and e-mail requests for an interview were postponed, denied or ignored by the state Department of Human Resources, the agency that oversees DFACS.</
At least one aspect of Hanna’s case is clear: When DFACS’ runaways dodge the law, there are few safety nets to catch them.</
Neither DFACS nor Cobb County police had any legal obligation to send Hanna’s information to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. And though Hanna likely would have lived had her fingerprints been submitted to either the center for missing children or the FBI, for privacy reasons, the FBI’s fingerprint database rarely accepts prints from runaway juveniles.</
The Center for Missing Children can accept children’s prints, but it rarely does. The fingerprints the center keeps almost always come from cautious parents who intentionally had their kids’ prints taken. It’s almost impossible for parents to wrench juvenile fingerprints from police.</
There simply is no central database for juvenile fingerprints.</
That’s what really gets Maxine. Not long after she began piecing together what went wrong with Hanna’s case, Maxine started thinking about the need for law enforcement agencies and DFACS to share whatever information they have with each other. Why shouldn’t there be a central database for juvenile fingerprints? Why shouldn’t DFACS have been required to tell Cobb police everything the agency knew? Why shouldn’t Henry County have been obligated to send Hanna’s fingerprints to the FBI or the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children?</
If even one life could be spared, there should be a database. And Maxine thinks the law that creates that database should be named for Hanna.</
Riverdale, Ga., April 2004-June 2005</
A few days after Maxine helps Detective Rodriguez identify Hanna’s body, she calls Otis. He needs to know what happened.</
“They’re 99 percent that it’s Hanna,” she tells him.</
“No, it’s not,” he says.</
“Yes, it is.”</
He takes a pause.</
“I gotta go.”</
Of all the people looking for Hanna, Otis was the last to learn she was gone - and the last to hear from her.</
He’d been worried. He knew she’d do anything for attention. He knew that whatever she was looking for, she’d chase it all the way across the country. And he knew she would never find it, at least not the way she was looking.</
But he never, ever, expected her to die.</
Shortly after he hangs up on Maxine, Otis is scheduled to work a shift as a produce clerk at Publix. He shows up for work, then dips into the break room. He starts crying uncontrollably. His boss sends him home.</
He sits in front of the computer, poring over the stories about Hanna’s death. He finally lets it all sink in.</
The Santa Ana police call. They want Otis to find old phone bills from when Hanna last called him. Police specifically want the number she’d been calling from. Otis asks his dad to find the old records (the phone is in his father’s name), but he threw them away.</
The police stop calling.</
About three weeks after he finds out about Hanna, Otis is at Publix stocking produce. He hears something over the PA that makes him stop what he’s doing.</
It’s a Carole King song, not his usual thing. But the lyrics make him freeze:</
Travelin’ around sure gets me down and lonely</
Nothin’ else to do but close my mind</
I sure hope the road don’t come to own me</
There’s so many dreams I’ve yet to find</
It was as if Hanna was talking to him. That was the type of stuff she always was saying. After he gets home from work, he downloads “So Far Away.” He listens to it again and again. Then, he begins to write her back. Over the next several weeks, he writes a chorus:</
Even though you’re gone</
You’re still in me</
and some verses:</
If I can turn back the hands of time,</
God willing,</
I’d scoop her up</
Before the tragedies,</
Before the killing,</
Before the O.C.</
And way before you disappeared.</
He records the song as part of an album he’s cutting at a studio in Fayetteville. </
He calls the track “For Hanna.”</
To hear Otis’ song, visit www.myspace.com/otissong</
Researching this story</
Creative Loafing News Editor Mara Shalhoup interviewed friends and relatives of Hanna Montessori, as well as child welfare and law enforcement officials, to report this story. Shalhoup did additional reporting in Maine and Southern California.</
The Georgia Open Records Act was used to obtain more than 300 pages of documents from the state Division of Family and Children Services. Additional documents were obtained through records requests to the Cobb County and Los Angeles police departments.</
The interviews and documents were used to reconstruct conversations and events.</
For more details on sourcing, click here.</
News intern Alejandro Leal contributed reporting to this story.