The Fight Against Crime: Notes From The Front : Tracking Teen Runaways Has Its Rewards

LANCASTER —  Each Monday morning, the nightmares of desperate parents land on Marvin McCoin’s desk at the Lancaster Sheriff’s Station in the form of about 20 missing-teenager reports.

Compiled by deputies, they contain the names and phone numbers of the youths’ acquaintances, and other helpful clues that McCoin, a 72-year-old volunteer, will need to try to track down the week’s batch of runaways and overnight revelers too busy having fun to call home.

From Monday through Thursday, starting at 6:30 a.m. and wrapping up at noon, McCoin does the phone work and records-checking that deputies don’t have time for.

And in the process, the former aerospace worker and World War II veteran has found a way to appease the restlessness that retirement brought him.

“It was the first time I had been out of work in my life,” McCoin said. “I just had to find something to do.”

McCoin began doing volunteer work at the station seven years ago, after 30 years in the Air Force, and working as a maintenance crew manager and real estate salesman.

He spent his first five years doing routine paperwork and making phone calls to help deputies track down stolen cars and check bouncers, then moved to missing persons in June 1994 when the D.A.’s office took over responsibility for bad checks.

Since then, McCoin has helped slash a backlog of 150 Antelope Valley missing-teenager cases to about 15. He has received a commendation from Sheriff Sherman Block, and earlier this month was named the department’s volunteer of the year.

“You feel like you’ve accomplished more when you’re looking for kids than when you’re looking for cars,” McCoin said.

He spends his workdays calling not only the friends and acquaintances of the missing, but also dozens of runaway shelters throughout the county and sometimes nation, in hopes that the teenagers may have fled to one.

Though McCoin estimates that 25% of the youths reported missing return home within three to five days none the worse for wear, he also uses his supervised access to juvenile arrest records in search of runaways who have turned to crime.

One of the toughest parts of the job is comforting the friends he has worried during the course of his search.

“You try to allay their fears,” he said. “You try to explain to them that most kids come home in a few days.”

He said the most frustrating thing is when a person who reported the disappearance moves away or changes his phone number. Because then he cannot find out if the teenager ever returned home, or report the news to worried friends.

“It’s amazing how many parents who reported their kids missing have disconnected their phones,” he said.

Sgt. Gordon Carn, who supervises McCoin and the deputy in charge of missing children’s reports, Dan Gordon, said the station handled about 2,000 missing persons in the past year.

Contrary to widespread opinion, he said, there is no minimum time requirement to be classified as missing. “It depends on the circumstances,” he said. “If a kid on a tricycle is gone for 10 minutes you’re looking at an immediate response.”

Carn estimated that 95% of teen cases are voluntary runaways, many of them repeaters. “McCoin can probably recognize the names of the regular customers,” he said.

McCoin’s work frees deputies for pressing duties, Carn said. “If we didn’t have him we would have to assign a deputy at least 20 hours a week to do the telephone follow-ups.”

McCoin finds his own rewards. He said he recently helped track down a Lancaster girl who ran away in 1993 at age 15.

“She kept on moving. She went to Chicago. She went to New Jersey, but we finally got her whereabouts. Then her parents finally got her to come back home.”