When a 16-year-old Riverside resident disappeared the night of Feb. 26 police had few leads. The next day and on Wednesday, Feb. 28, when no one had yet heard from her, a village-wide panic was beginning to set in.
By Tuesday night a cadre of resident volunteers, acting on a tip from police that the girl was seen scanning train times at the Riverside train station on the night she disappeared, posted fliers giving the girl’s description at stations from Berwyn to Hinsdale.
“There was a flood of e-mails,” said Dalia Lietuvninkas, who ended up organizing the volunteer corps. “I said I was going to do the fliers and asked who wanted to come with me.”
The e-mail chain had grown to such an extent by the morning of Thursday, March 1, that another call for volunteers to hand out 10,000 missing child fliers at Union Station in downtown Chicago, drew 100 positive responses within two hours.
“The willingness of people to drop everything and help [was impressive],” said Sarah Thompson, one of the many who volunteered to make the trip downtown.
In the end, there was no need for the volunteers to board the downtown train. By 11:30 a.m. March 1, Riverside police were heading toward a Hinsdale coffee shop, acting on a tip from a woman who saw one of the fliers posted at the Hinsdale train station.
The woman told police that sitting in the Starbucks at 37 Washington Blvd. was someone matching the girl’s description. The girl was in the company of a teenage boy who also matched the description given by Riverside police as the person last seen with the girl.
Around noon, some 63 hours after the girl was last seen, Riverside police arrived at the coffee shop and confirmed that she had been found.
Hinsdale police detained the boy, identified as Robert A. LaMantia, 18, of Western Springs. He has been charged with one count of harboring a runaway, a Class A misdemeanor that carries a maximum penalty of one year in prison. According to Hinsdale Deputy Police Chief Mark Mandarino, LaMantia posted bond and was released. He has a court date on April 5 at the DuPage County Courthouse in Wheaton.
Mandarino confirmed that the girl had apparently been staying with the boy at a home in the 600 block of South Monroe in Hinsdale. According to Riverside Assistant Police Chief Thomas Weitzel, the girl and LaMantia met online about three months ago.
Meanwhile, the DuPage County State’s Attorney declined to file any further charges against LaMantia, who is considered an adult. The 16-year-old girl is a juvenile.
“I don’t foresee any further charges,” Mandarino said. “But we’re not 100 percent complete with our investigation.”
Riverside police are also not done with their investigation, which began at roughly 10:45 p.m. Monday, Feb. 26, when the girl was first reported missing.
According to Weitzel, while the girl appears to have left with LaMantia voluntarily on Feb. 26, his department is still in the process of determining whether she was enticed to leave by LaMantia.
The department received permission from the girl’s family to seize a personal computer. The department is now in the process of working with the Regional Computer Forensic Laboratory, who are experts in digital evidence recovery, to find if there’s any evidence LaMantia “solicited her to leave home,” said Weitzel.
The girl’s mother contacted police late on Feb. 26 to report that her daughter had not come home after a night at the Riverside Public Library.
The girl was supposed to call her mother for a ride home, but didn’t. A Riverside Library employee later told police that she had seen a teenage boy leave the library just before the 9 p.m. closing time that night. It seemed clear, the employee told police, that he was waiting for the girl, who left shortly after him.
The couple was seen earlier that night at Grumpy’s Cafe, which is near the library. One witness said someone matching the description of the girl was checking the train schedule at some point during the evening.
On Feb. 27 and 28, Riverside police stepped up the investigation, checking the riverbank and the forested area in Riverside Lawn for any signs of possible foul play. Later, however, it appeared that while they still didn’t know exactly where she was, the girl was apparently safe. Police came to that opinion after tracking down her personal account on myspace.com, an online friend-networking site. While missing, the girl created a new myspace.com page, according to police, after her original page received so many hits and comments.
During the three days the girl was missing, Weitzel said that Riverside police racked up 52 hours of overtime working on that one case. The department assigned two detectives to the case, one of whom was an officer pulled out of the patrol rotation to assist in the investigation. That forced the department to juggle its shifts to make sure the village had enough officers on the street.
Police Chief Eugene Karczewski even called in a favor from a close friend, Chicago Police Supt. Phil Cline. Cline assigned a Chicago detective to contact Riverside police and assist in any way. That assistance came in the form of getting the girl’s description posted on the front page of the Chicago Police Department’s daily bulletin.
“That’s given to every Chicago police officer every day,” Karczewski said. “[Cline] went out of his way for us.”
This story has been changed to remove the name of the minor girl.
