Advocates Push For A National Reporting System For Missing Adults

Families and friends of Wisconsin’s missing persons gathered in Green Bay on Sunday to draw attention to their cases.

As many as 165 people are missing in Wisconsin, according to event coordinator Marsha Loritz. She said her mother, Victoria Prokopovitz, is one of them.

“She left everything behind, her purse, her cell phone and her cigarettes,” Loritz said. “She had no vehicle. There was no trace of her.”

Loritz said her mother disappeared from her home in Pittsfield, just west of Green Bay sometime in the night on April 25, 2013.

“People don’t vanish,” she said. “Somebody knows something and that’s my hope is someone will see this and come forward with information that could bring answers to us. I mean this has been a living nightmare, to not know where she is and to worry is she OK?”

Loritz and other missing persons’ advocates are pushing for “Billy’s Law,” a federal law that would require law enforcement to enter information on missing adults into a national database, NamUs, or National Missing and Unidentified Persons Systems.

Loritz said the information would then be made widely available.

“It houses fingerprints and DNA and it’s searchable by public and by the police departments and coroners,” she said. “Right now, there is now law that states any adult has to be listed in a database. Most databases, it’s the family who enters them.”

Loritz likens NamUs to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.