‘We want her home.’ Idaho mom enlists national help as police search for missing teen

More than anything, Joanna Rilang just wants to hug her daughter, Alyssa Jones, and tell her that she loves her.

Alyssa, a 14-year-old with a “heart of gold,” her mother said, disappeared from her family’s Boise apartment over a month ago and is the subject of a missing person investigation by the Boise Police Department.

Rilang has been working to locate her daughter ever since, handing out posters, tracking down leads on social media and enlisting the help of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a Virginia-based nonprofit that works with families and law enforcement to help locate missing kids.

But answers elude her. Since Alyssa disappeared, Rilang said, she has been fielding suspect messages from people claiming to know the whereabouts of Alyssa — whom Boise police are considering a runaway person — or saying Jones is ready to come home. On Saturday, Rilang said, she plans to load her belongings onto a trailer, walk away from her Boise lease and follow Alyssa’s trail herself.

“I’m just a mom trying to find my kid,” Rilang said. “I just want to know if she’s OK.”

Alyssa ‘lights up’ a room, mom says

Alyssa has long brown hair and brown eyes and stands 5 feet, 5 inches tall. She’s an outdoorsy teen who loves to draw, Rilang said, and she can sketch just about anything. She wants to be an artist. She loves to go camping. She has five siblings, the youngest three — Madison, 11, Xaden, 10, and Mercedes, 6 — still living in Boise’s Liberty Park neighborhood.

When her youngest sister has nightmares, Rilang said, she jumps in bed with Alyssa.

“When she walks in a room, it just lights up,” she said.

But Alyssa has schizophrenia and depression, which grew worse after her stepfather was incarcerated last year. Alyssa earned good grades in eighth grade at Fairmont Junior High School — almost all A’s and B’s, Rilang said — but started having trouble focusing, missing classes and getting nightmares. Rilang said she kept Alyssa home more often out of concern and worries she was too strict.

Rilang last saw her daughter the night of May 20. When she got home from work, a commercial cleaning job at Automated Maintenance Services, she did her laundry and lay down in bed for the night. Alyssa came into her room, gave her a kiss and told her she loved her, Rilang said.

The next morning, the family woke up around 11 a.m., Rilang said, planning to go to Lucky Peak Reservoir to collect rocks for the enclosures of their pet bearded dragons Juliette, Juliette II and Spike. When Alyssa’s youngest sister, Mercedes, went to Alyssa’s room to wake her up, she wasn’t there. Juliette, the largest of the reptiles — who Rilang said is 2 feet long — was gone from her terrarium.

Rilang knocked on neighbors’ doors and called everyone she thought Alyssa could be hanging out with to see whether her daughter was visiting them, she said. But Alyssa wasn’t anywhere to be found — and one friend told Rilang that Alyssa had talked about running away.

That’s when Rilang called the police.

Boise police took a runaway person report that day, said spokesperson Haley Williams, and officers continue investigating leads and exploring other options to locate her. When the department receives a missing person case, she said, officers enter the child’s name into the National Crime Information Center database, which alerts law enforcement agencies across the country if an officer comes across the person — for example, in a traffic stop or welfare check.

Officers talk to as many people as possible to form a picture of where a missing person might be going, Williams said, and they investigate any locations that come up. If they receive a lead that someone might be in a residence out of state, for example, Boise police contact officers within that jurisdiction to visit the property. Officers continue to follow new leads on Alyssa, Williams said.

“That’s still very active at this time,” she said.

A few days after Alyssa went missing, Rilang said, she emailed the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The center provides emotional support for families, distributes posters online and through a network of businesses, and conducts searches of social media and public databases to generate leads it shares with law enforcement, among other services.

When the center receives a report of a missing person, said Leemie Kahng-Sofer, the director of case management for the center’s Missing Children Division, a case manager is immediately assigned. The investigator gathers information about the child, including possible companions and medical conditions, and uses it to determine what resources to deploy from the center.

If a child has a life-threatening condition or appears to have been enticed by a stranger online, the center can send a member of a team of retired law enforcement officers with specialty training to assist law enforcement with the search.

The most visible tool wielded by the center, Kahng-Sofer said, is the missing person poster, often displayed in gas stations and Walmart. That’s on top of posting photos on social media and contacting news outlets. Any leads are shared with police.

“We never give up hope,” she said.

Rilang said she’s handed out about 50 posters in Boise. The poster has reached thousands of people online, she said, and it’s heartwarming to see Alyssa in local news coverage.

“It’s touching to see that people actually do care,” she said. “And I’m hoping that somebody will know something.”

Mom takes matters into her own hands

The last few months have been disorienting for Rilang, she said, because tips she’s found through social media have led to dead ends. Since she posted her daughter’s disappearance on Facebook, she said she’s had people reach out with screenshots of Alyssa’s social media accounts and say they know where she could be, but the tips haven’t panned out.

In one instance, Rilang said, someone claiming to be a friend of Alyssa’s messaged Rilang on Facebook, said he knew where Alyssa was and sent an address for a house in Los Angeles. When she called police in the area with the tip, Rilang said, they found a house for sale with no one there. The same person messaged her last week and said Alyssa was on her way home — but she never showed, Rilang said.

Most recently, a mother of one of Alyssa’s friends shared a social media post purporting to be from Alyssa’s account with a self-portrait of Alyssa in what appeared to be her grandmother’s house in California, Rilang said. Law enforcement has not confirmed that Alyssa is with her grandmother, Williams said.

It scares her that Alyssa isn’t on her medication for schizophrenia, Rilang said, and that her depression might cause her to hurt herself. She said she’s frustrated because she feels like the only tips being generated in the case come from her, not Boise police.

So Rilang is trading in her 2005 Chevy Tahoe and 2015 Chrysler Town and Country to make a down payment on a Ford Expedition that can fit her kids and travel long distances. On Saturday, she said, she’s planning to load everything she owns into a travel trailer and start by driving down to the California home.

“She doesn’t know how big she was to us,” Rilang said. “She meant a lot to this family and we’re lost. We want her home.”

Anyone with information about where Alyssa is or whom she’s with should contact the Boise Police Department. The department can be reached at (208) 377-6790.