VANISHED without a trace! That is what happened to 202 of the 2,122 children reported missing last year alone, leaving devastated families to unravel the mysteries surrounding their disappearance.

Many of these families long for closure but, at the same time, harbour the faintest of hopes that one day their loved one will return home.

Barbara Ashman is one of them, she knows it is more likely that her daughter is dead, but a part of her refuses to believe it, instead she is still watching and waiting for what she still hopes can be a happy ending to her nightmare.

It has been two years since Ashman’s 13-year-old daughter Peta-Gaye Panton went missing but she still cannot recount the sequence of events without tears spilling down her cheek.

The blown-up photograph she clutched tightly in her hand during the interview with the Jamaica Observer, is the only evidence that her ‘sweet Peta-Gaye’ ever walked this earth as the family does not even have the benefit of a grave to visit.

“She was so nice to me, and she always say ‘Mommy, I am going to make you feel proud’,” the still grieving mother said.

Ashman, a vendor in Half-Way Tree, said she went home late one fateful night in June 2010, expecting to be greeted by her daughter as she usually is, but this was not to be. Repeated calls to Peta-Gaye’s cell phone went unanswered and when she did not come home that night, Ashman’s motherly instinct told her something was terribly wrong.

“She always say to me ‘Mommy, I not going to run away, I will always be with you’, and so when I see she nuh come home, I say to my son something happened to her,” she said.

The next day she went to the Duhaney Park Police Station to report her daughter missing and was told to return three days later with a photograph of the child.

Refusing to wait for the police to start their investigation, Ashman began tracking her daughter’s movement on the day she disappeared and learnt that she had gone to visit a school friend in Duhaney Park earlier that day.

Checks with the mother of that friend revealed that Peta-Gaye had left that location at 6:00 pm, boarded a bus headed for her home in the Molynes Road area.

Two hours later at 8:00 pm Peta-Gaye was said to have borrowed a neighbour’s phone to call her cousin to come stay with her at her house, claiming she was bored. The last thing she told the cousin, who could not make it that night, was that she was ‘waiting on Mark’, a man known to the family. He was later questioned by the police but reportedly denied seeing her.

From there, the trail went absolutely cold as that was the last time she was seen or heard from.

A week later the police found a badly decomposed body at the Two Sisters Cave in Hellshire, St Catherine and buried it in a paupers grave in Commodore in Linstead. The clothes removed from that body appeared to be similar to what Peta Gaye was wearing when she went missing.

On the same day the body was found, Ashman said she received a call from a private number and heard what appeared to be her daughter’s voice trying to call out to her for help.

Although Peta-Gaye would have been dead for days when that call came, if the badly decomposed body was hers, Ashman is convinced it was her daughter’s voice she heard on the other end of that line.

Guilt has added to her uncertainty and despair and has made the last two years torture for this mother of six.

“Ah just spend a lot of time imagining and wondering what took place that night and just hear har in me head crying out for mommy and knowing I couldn’t help her,” she said.

At nights when Ashman sees the pictures of missing children flashing across the television screen, it only reopens the emotional wounds.

With no ongoing police investigation into her daughter’s disappearance or death, Ashman fears she will never get closure.

“These investigations should not leave up like this, the police should follow up to see what really happen to these children,” she lamented.

Betty Ann Blaine, conveyor of Hear the Children’s Cry, a volunteer group providing counselling for families of missing children said the organisation has dealt with many cases where children have simply vanished in thin air.

She cited the example of a two-year-old who went missing from his home in St Thomas a few years ago.

“They (family members) were in the field with the two-year-old and one minute he was there and the next minute they turned round, he was gone and they have not seen him since,” she said.

She also cited the case of a grandmother from Westmoreland whose then 16-year-old granddaughter left home for school six years ago and was never seen or heard from again.

Meanwhile, Blaine complained the Ananda Alert System which her organisation fought to have established in 2009 to track missing children is not working as it should.

The alert system was named after Ananda Dean, the primary schoolgirl whose headless, decomposing remains were found at Chancery Hall in Red Hills, St Andrew two weeks after she went missing.

Once the police receive reports of a missing child, they are expected to alert media houses who will publish or broadcast the child’s photograph, details of his/her attire and where he/she was last seen.

Telecommunications companies, Digicel and LIME were also to send text messages and images of the missing child to every cellular phone subscriber on their respective networks. Advertising companies also agreed to post the images and information on electronic billboards across the island. The postal system, disaster co-ordinators and parish development committees also committed to be part of the network, posting images of any missing child at prominent places in town squares and at post offices. Taxi companies were also to have carried pictures of the missing children in their vehicles.

“If the system was working our jobs would be so much easier,” Blaine said.

With a number of missing children believed to have been trafficked, Blaine said Hear the Children’s Cry has met with the British High Commission about having the photographs of missing children at their visa section to prevent these children from leaving the country. She is hoping that other embassies will be willing to be a part of this process.

But while not all these missing children end up dead or even stay missing forever, many of those who do return home have endure horrific ordeals during the time they have been away from home.

“Some of the kids who we counsel sometimes run away to live with boyfriends who beat them up,” explained Maxine Cooper, a counsellor at Hear the Children’s Cry .

Her colleague, Celta Kirkland, said a lot of them have also returned home pregnant.

“Sometimes they are gone for all three months and they refuse to say where they have been,” she said.