Boy’s Disappearance Still Baffles San Diego

The case of Danielle van Dam is heading toward closure, but the search for another missing child in San Diego has grown cold and police admit they have no new leads.

The disappearance in late April of Jahi Turner, 2, unfolded much like that in early February of 7-year-old Danielle: Neighbors and police mounted a massive search, the media kept a vigil, and a grieving family begged an unknown kidnapper to release the child. Posters and buttons were distributed.

Danielle’s body was found within a month, and a neighbor, David Westerfield, 50, has been convicted of her abduction and murder. A jury is deliberating whether he should be executed or sent to prison for life.

But Jahi has yet to be found, nearly five months after he was reported missing by his stepfather during an outing in Balboa Park.

The boy’s mother and stepfather have been questioned repeatedly by police, and investigators have been unable to find witnesses, fingerprints or other forensic evidence to validate the stepfather’s account that the boy disappeared when he left him alone near a toddler’s playground for a few minutes to get a soda.

Police have declined to label the stepfather a suspect or rule him out as a possible suspect. Meanwhile, the boy’s father and paternal grandmother accuse the stepfather of withholding information.

Police who were assigned full time for weeks to find Jahi have run out of leads and gone on to other cases, although they still hope for a break. The volunteer search effort and reward drive fizzled, and the Jahi story has dropped from headlines that have been dominated for months by the trial of Danielle’s killer.

Cleared away is the makeshift memorial of poems, teddy bears and flowers that neighbors and searchers erected at the playground where Jahi’s stepfather said he last saw the child.

“It’s like everything’s a dead-end,” said Malcolm Lambert, a retired social worker who joined the search for Jahi and later took a Greyhound bus trip to Maryland to meet with the child’s extended family. “It’s very frustrating.”

Jahi’s mother, Tameka Jones, a Navy seaman, and his stepfather, Tieray Jones, no longer cooperate with the media or a private investigator who is working on behalf of the child’s father.

“I feel they’re being deceptive with us,” said investigator Bill Garcia.

In the days after stepfather Tieray Jones reported that Jahi disappeared, police scoured the neighborhood and the brushy canyons near the family’s apartment in the Golden Hill section of San Diego.

Danielle’s mother, Brenda van Dam, came to the Joneses’ apartment to offer emotional support to Jahi’s mother. Many of the searchers who had hunted for Danielle took up the same cause for Jahi.

For a week in early May, dozens of police officers, Marines, sailors and sanitation workers sifted through 5,000 tons of garbage at the city dump--centering the search on an area where garbage from Golden Hill is dumped.

In July, police considered doing a similar search in another dump near the U.S.-Mexico border. But Police Chief David Bejarano decided against that move after being warned by health officials of possible health hazards if officers and others combed through the sludge-coated garbage.

“The case is still a priority with us, but as time goes on, you have to go on working other cases,” said police spokesman David Cohen. “If we got a major tip requiring significant manpower, we’d move on it.”

The two cases made San Diego ground zero for the national obsession this year over abducted children. And if the cases had an emotional wallop on the city, they also may have had a practical impact.

Bejarano told a City Council committee last month that the enormous amount of manpower assigned to the Danielle and Jahi cases may have contributed to a drop in the percentage of homicide cases solved citywide. Police solved less than a third of homicide cases in the first six months of 2002, compared with more than half of such cases the previous year.

“You only have so many people to go around,” said police Lt. Jim Collins, noting that 50 detectives worked for a month on Danielle’s case.

But Collins said that clearance rates for murders tend to fluctuate and that the year-end rate may yet match that of 2001 as police return to full caseloads. (San Diego has one of the lowest violent crime rates of any large U.S. city and thus a change in clearance rates can hinge on a few cases.)

Danielle had lived most of her short life in the upscale Sabre Springs neighborhood, but Jahi disappeared only four days after arriving in San Diego to live with his mother and stepfather in the blue-collar neighborhood just east of downtown. He had been living with a grandmother in Maryland.

When the child was reported missing, Tameka Jones, 18, was at sea off San Diego aboard the USS Rushmore. She was airlifted to San Diego and has been assigned to shore duty.

Relatives in Frederick, Md., hold occasional candlelight vigils in hopes that Jahi will soon be home.

“I try never to be negative, to always pray to the Lord to help poor little Jahi,” said Dina Naylor, the mother of Jahi’s father. “We hope that maybe some couple who couldn’t have children fell in love with him, took him and will return him someday.”

Still, Naylor and other relatives are suspicious of Tieray Jones, 24, who had a series of arrests on suspicion of burglary and drug possession in Maryland.

“Lord forgive me if I’m wrong, but we just think that Tieray knows something he won’t say,” Naylor said.