Audrii Cunningham’s body was found Tuesday in the Trinity River, Polk County Sheriff Byron Lyons told reporters. Don Steven McDougal, 42, who Lyons said lives in a trailer on the family’s property, was held without bond on a capital murder charge in connection to her death, according to Polk County Jail records.
The tragic case in Texas, which prompted an AMBER Alert and national coverage, represents one of the rarest kinds of missing children cases. The vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of children reported missing in the United States each year are found and very few are abducted by people other than family members or given an AMBER Alert.
And while each case is troubling, how much attention they receive from law enforcement, the media and the public can vary widely based on a number of factors. Among them are race, age and the circumstances of their disappearance, according to Gaetane Borders, president of Peas in Their Pods, which has advocated for missing children of color since 2007.
“When every child goes missing, it should be urgent for everyone to assist,” said Borders. “But the reality is that it’s far more difficult for children of color to get the same level of attention as Audrii or [Gabby] Petito and so forth and so on.”
What happens when a child disappears? Racial disparities abound in efforts to find missing kids in America
