A bill to help find missing Ohioans has been introduced by Statehouse lawmakers following a Dispatch investigation.
Ohio House Bill 217 would require law enforcement agencies around the state to enter information about missing residents into the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) within 30 days of a report being filed with police. The FIND Act (Finding and Identifying with NamUs Data) was introduced April 1 by State Rep. Christine Cockley, D-Columbus, and State Rep. Kevin Ritter, R-Marietta.
The bipartisan proposal follows The Dispatch’s VANISHED investigation, which found that Ohio police rarely use every tool at their disposal to bring missing persons home. One of those tools — federal clearinghouse NamUS — was underutilized by law enforcement, which failed to enter hundreds of names to the federal database that’s helped to solve more than 46,000 cases, The Dispatch found.
The family of Andy Chapman, a central Ohioan who went missing in 2006, hosted a march for him in June 2024. Other families with missing family members were also in attendance.
“We are at a pivotal moment when technology can help solve cases that have remained unsolved for years,” Cockley said in a press release. “The FIND Act will equip law enforcement and medical professionals across Ohio with the tools they need to support families of the missing, while also giving families and the public a greater voice in the process.”
Ritter said he was pleased to collaborate with Cockley on the bill to “help bring comfort to the families and friends of the missing.” If signed into law, the bill would make Ohio the 17th state in the country to require reporting to NamUS, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
On any given day, roughly 1,000 Ohioans are missing, The Dispatch’s VANISHED investigation found. And the number of Ohioans who go missing each year is on the rise, climbing nearly 18% in the past three years, from 19,014 in 2021 to 22,374 in 2023, according to data from the Ohio Attorney General’s Office.
At the end of October, law enforcement had failed to enter 327 of the 366 Ohio children the state listed as missing a year or more into NamUs. The Dispatch compiled its own database of Ohioans missing for more than a year who had not been submitted to NamUs.
After the investigation published, Gov. Mike DeWine appointed a missing persons working group to examine The Dispatch’s findings and make recommendations that could help find more vanished Ohioans.
The working group hosted its sixth and final regular meeting April 17.
A final report of recommendations could be released in May. But, the working group has already discussed a number of proposals and hopes to work with Cockley and Ritter to bring some to fruition by changing state law.
Andy Wilson, director of the Ohio Department of Public Safety and leader of the working group, said the working group will focus on six categories for proposed recommendations. Those include legislation, training, resources, policy, programs and research.
Those recommendations include, but are not limited to, requiring missing persons reports to be digitized and stored; changing alert systems to include more missing people or just alert the public in a certain geographic area; relying on advocates to work with families of missing persons and hiring more analysts to assist detectives on cases around Ohio.
Wilson also suggested having DeWine and Ohio’s U.S. senators send a letter to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, asking that the DOJ create a way for cases to be automatically entered into NamUS from another database already widely used by law enforcement.
Wilson suggested building off the momentum of the working group and Ohio House Bill 217 to get the group’s slate of recommendations across the finish line. And the working group plans to do a check-in about six to nine months after it issues its final report to ensure changes are moving forward.
“I think we can do some amendments and try to tag some other stuff onto it,” Wilson said of the FIND Act. “We have a vehicle.”
Dispatch Underserved Communities reporter Danae King can be reached at dking@dispatch.com or on X at @DanaeKing.
Dispatch investigative reporter Max Filby can be reached by email at mfilby@dispatch.com. Find him on X at the handle @MaxFilby or on Facebook at @ReporterMaxFilby.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: After Dispatch probe, bill on missing persons introduced at Statehouse