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Missing Area Boy Found in Seattle: A Safeway Worker Tips Police, Who Arrest the 4-Year-Old's Mother and Alert His Father, a Wichitan.

Posted on: Friday, 23 December 2005, 12:00 CST

By Tim Potter, The Wichita Eagle, Kan., The Wichita Eagle, Kan.

Dec. 23--A missing-person poster and an alert grocery store employee led Seattle police to a 4-year-old boy from Wichita who had been missing for two years, police said Thursday.

The boy's 23-year-old mother, LaNora Dawn Lowe, on Tuesday was arrested on a warrant accusing her in the child-abduction case, Seattle police said. Wichita police say she never returned her son after having visitation with him in the summer of 2003.

The boy's father, Anthony S. Townsend, traveled from Wichita to Seattle to be reunited with his son, Elisha, officials said.

Townsend couldn't be reached by The Eagle for comment, but, "He is very grateful to the Safeway employee who spotted his child, and he wants to thank him," said Tina Schwartz, a spokeswoman for the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

Kenny Keni, a 35-year-old Seattle Safeway store supervisor, said he recognized the boy and his mother while they were in a checkout lane Tuesday evening. The realization made him nervous.

Keni had seen their pictures on one of the center's missing-child posters at the store.

"I make it a habit to look at it every day," he said. "I'm just glad to be of help."

The case shows the importance of people paying attention to pictures that can help locate and identify missing children, Schwartz said.

"One person doing that out in Seattle has helped to unify a father with his son before the holidays," she said.

Sending out pictures of missing children is the "No. 1 tool in recovering a missing child," she said. That's why the national center and authorities remind parents to keep updated photographs of their children.

Of the cases reported to the center, Schwartz said, 1 in 6 children is recovered because someone recognized them from a missing-child picture and notified authorities.

In the Wichita-to-Seattle case, the boy's mother was wanted on a warrant from Sedgwick County accusing her of interfering with parental custody, said Wichita police Lt. T.K. Bridges.

Lowe was being held in the King County Jail in Seattle on Thursday night in lieu of a $25,000 bond, and authorities expected that she would be extradited to Wichita for prosecution.

The case traces back to August 2003, when the boy was reported as abducted, Bridges said. His parents had been involved in a custody battle that summer. Police say Lowe had a right to visit with her son but broke a court order when she didn't return him.

After she and the boy went missing, Wichita police concluded that she might have taken her son to Washington state, Bridges said. Lowe had family there. Members of Lowe's family contacted by The Eagle declined to comment for this article.

Mark Sevart, the lawyer who has represented the boy's father on custody matters, said Thursday that Lowe sought a protective order against Townsend before she and the boy went missing. A judge dismissed the request after a hearing, according to court records.

Lowe's last known Wichita address was in the 200 block of North Indiana, but before she left, Bridges said, she had been living out of a car.

She is from a large family, attended Wichita East High School and was a talented violist. In 2000, she received the Janice Hupp Memorial Fund Award from Wichita Youth Symphony. Her prize was a viola.

The first break in the missing-child case came Monday when someone reported seeing the missing boy and his mother at a Seattle homeless shelter, Bridges said. The national missing children's center was notified.

The sighting at the shelter prompted the center to inundate the Seattle area with posters showing the missing boy and his mother. On Monday, 2,500 posters went out within a 15-mile radius of Seattle, Schwartz said.

After Keni recognized Lowe, the store called Seattle police. She left the store and got on a transit bus. Police ordered the bus to be stopped. They arrested Lowe without incident and took her son into protective custody, said Officer Sean Whitcomb, a spokesman for the Seattle Police Department.

Wichita police regularly encounter cases in which children aren't promptly returned after visitation with one parent, Bridges said. What makes this case unusual is that the mother took the child so far from Wichita, he said.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, family members commit more than 200,000 child abductions a year -- trying to deny custody rights to others.

"A lot of people don't understand the seriousness of this crime," Schwartz said.

Contributing: L. Kelly, Hurst Laviana and Nate Hubbard of The Eagle

Reach L. Kelly at 268-6314 or lkelly@wichitaeagle.com [mailto:lkelly@wichitaeagle.com].

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Copyright (c) 2005, The Wichita Eagle, Kan.

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Source: The Wichita Eagle (Wichita, Kan.)

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