The Other Missing Kids / They quickly faded from headlines and public attention
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The Other Missing Kids / They quickly faded from headlines and public attention
Kevin ***an, Chronicle Staff Writer
Published: 4:00 am PST, Friday, December 4, 1998
1998-12-04 04:00:00 PDT BAY AREA -- You have never heard much about Toni Clark, the 17- year-old girl who vanished mysteriously off the Bay Bridge eight years ago. Or
Clark Handa, the 3-year-old snatched from his Fairfield bedroom 14 years ago under his parents' noses.
They were not like
Polly Klaas or
Amber Swartz-Garcia, or any of the dozens of others who became unlucky poster kids for the plight of missing children in the past decade or so.
Toni and Clark were just as gone, just as loved. But the difference is that they were largely ignored by the public and media. And they still are -- like most of the 150 other children snatched by strangers each year in America.
"*snip*
"I don't care what anyone says, what anyone does, I am never giving up looking for my baby," said
Gwen Clark of San Bruno, whose daughter Toni is 26 if she is still alive. "I think she was abducted, by somebody wacko.
"My daughter's story never got the kind of notice it should have, but that doesn't stop me. I will never give up. She is alive."
Toni was driving home after visiting a cousin in Oakland on March 16, 1990, when her Chevrolet Camaro stalled on the Bay Bridge just before midnight. Another car rammed the stopped Camaro, and when police came to check it out, Toni was gone.
The
Coast Guard dragged the bay and found nothing. Police eventually phased out the case, figuring that Toni must have been knocked off the bridge by the car that rammed hers, then disappeared under the waves.
But to this day, at least five local and national missing-children organizations still carry her poster and take calls with tips. Quietly. Otherwise, she is mostly forgotten outside her family.
"I know she was taken off that bridge because she called me a week later," Gwen Clark said. "I picked up the phone and for 40 seconds, I heard a female voice -- my daughter's -- crying and crying. I kept saying 'Hello, hello,' and then the line cut off." The phone company could not trace the call.
A few newspaper articles were written about Toni, and then no more. But Gwen Clark, a struggling single mother with another daughter, 15-year-old Clarissa, kept hunting between shifts as a retail store manager.
She soon found, like the parents of other missing kids who are either minorities -- the family is black -- or older than 13, that public interest wanes fast.
"Gwen would put up posters around town, then come back later to find them ripped down," said
Chris Wilder of the Vanished Children's
Alliance in San Jose, which keeps Toni's case file open. "Newspapers wouldn't write about it. People didn't pay attention, and law enforcement didn't act as diligently as we wish.
"We're convinced she was abducted. We think everyone else should have been convinced, too."
Police in San Bruno, Toni's hometown, say they did everything they could. They helped bring the driver who hit Toni's car up on manslaughter charges in 1991, but without a body or conclusive evidence, he was not convicted.
"We can understand Mrs.
Clark's grief, but we disagree with her," said Sergeant
Craig McKee- Parks. "We think Toni's body was swept out past the Golden Gate. It tears your heart out."
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