While I was looking into Toni Clark’s case, I came across this one. It’s also in the San Francisco Bay area. A truly sad and horrifying story.
SAN FRANCISCO — On Feb. 3, 1983, an unidentified man broke into Ora Owens’s Pierce Road apartment in Menlo Park and severely beat her.
During the attack, Ora’s son Mitchell Deon Owens, 4, entered the same room. Ora screamed at her son to run just before the attacker strangled her and left her for dead. Her other two sons, Antoine, 7, and Marte, 1, were there but slept through the attack.
Owens’s landlord found her when he came to collect rent the following day. He took her to the nearest hospital, where doctors treated her for neck and throat injuries.
Mitchell was nowhere to be found and has not been seen since. Police acting on a tip searched Dumbarton Bridge and the waters for two hours but found no sign of the boy.
Owens, 24, believed the man who attacked her and abducted Mitchell might have been a man she met the previous night at Enlisted Men’s Club at Moffet Field Naval Air Station.
The man offered her a drink, but she declined and walked away. Owens thought he could have followed her home that night and described him to police as about 25 years old, 6′ tall, with brown hair, blue eyes, a mustache, and tattoos on his arms.
On the day of Owens’s attack, a man dressed in a police uniform knocked on her door and asked about a report she had made on a stolen purse. The Menlo Park Police Department has no record of an officer going to Owens’s house that day.
Owens received several telephone calls from an unidentified man who threatened to kidnap her and her other two children. Police could not confirm whether or not the calls were related to Mitchell’s disappearance.
Owens blasted the police for how they handled the investigation. She believes the police did not search hard enough for her son because the family was black and poor.
Believe it or not, initially, the police listed her FOUR-YEAR-OLD son as a RUNAWAY and refused to look for him.