Link: https://www.actionnews5.com/2026/02/23/mom-3-who-vanished-24-years-ago-while-christmas-shopping-found-alive-well-authorities-say/

https://archive.ph/MkEsN

I hope there's a way for their children to relay a message to them.

Did she just peace out or what?

That was a long long way to the nearest cigarette kiosk.

Sounds like she got tired of it all and dipped. Especially with her telling the authorities to not reveal her location even to her family.

the daughter had a facebook page dedicated to bringing her mom home. It is sad and difficult to read at times.

Yes. Apparently the father suspected as much the entire time.

Her daughter, Amanda Smith, spoke to NBC News in 2020, and spoke about her father's theory on her mother's disappearance.

“He believes she just took off and left him, and us, that night,” Amanda said. “And I guess that’s possible. It’s hard to rule out that she just left all of us and started a new life. But there’s also something that nags at me, that something happened to her on her way back home.”

SHEESH. Def wanted to get away. Being a parent is rough, especially if you don't want it. Still fucked up what she did, making them wonder what happened for decades and decades and won't even face them to deal with the fallout. Fuck.

How do you stay “missing” that long without being found? Like if you applied for a job / filed your tax return / got a credit card wouldn’t some system get flagged?

I hope they sue her into the ground, what in the actual fuck.

Asking for a friend?

Who goes to a Kmart 17 miles away at 8:30 at night? Didn't Kmart (and most stores in general) close by 8 or 9? Even closing at 9, if you drove 17 miles at 40 miles an hour assuming zero traffic or other issues, you'd just barely make it to the store, let alone have time to shop. Awful cover story. F-.

I expect this assignment re-written from scratch, and the rough draft peer reviewed before a final hits my desk. Due Friday, minus 10 percent for the extension.

I'm wondering what the husband was like.

I wonder how many times the mother visited the page and just never did anything about it?

Back in 2001? I lived in semi-rural Maryland and our grocery stores were open till 10, or midnight if you wanted to drive to the nearest "big town", and there was a 24-hour Walmart about 45 minutes away. I can't speak to Kmart - there wasn't one in my area - but I wouldn't be surprised if her stores stayed open later as well.

Edit: also, regardless of normal store hours, this was a couple weeks before Christmas, so extended hours could definitely be in play.

Without reading the article, I choose to believe she finally found the perfect Christmas gift.

I understand wanting to leave, but it's hard to justify not giving any sign of life. This sounds like torture.

Officials said Smith’s family was notified that she had been located and were informed about her request to keep her whereabouts undisclosed.

Wonder if she'll be notified of their request for retroactive child support

I'm in a pretty large town and the only ones that were open later were Walmart, from what I recall. I don't think we even got 24h Walmart locations until the late 2000s.

But it has been 25 years, maybe age is getting to me...

Yeah, a good question to ask. But no way to really know how their relationship is based off of just this article.

This is both good and sucky for everyone. I feel for the family - glad for them to have some conclusion, but also sad for them to find out she just left.

We don't know what the mum went on to do. Whether she just noped out and lived by herself, or even if she had another family. Many unanswered questions and all anyone is left with is more unanswered questions and more undeserved pain for this family.

All I'll say, as a father of a couple of kids, is well done to the dad for holding them all together. I hope the mother will one day give them all the closure they deserve but I have a sneaking suspicion that all this will lead to is feelings of abandonment rather than loss.

Yes, that turns it from a mental breakdown to cruelty.

Maybe mum has more underlying issues.

They started to convict some people with no bodies too. How embarrassing that would be if they had someone in prison, or already executed.

They would probably suppress the information if they could if that was the case. Government employees all cover for each other. Especially prosecutors, those old boys are dishonest and rotten to the core, and run unopposed more often than not.

Prosecutors got a lot more powerful in the 80s, in their campaigns during the crime wave, and the satanic panic and all that. It didn't used to be such a powerful position as of now.

I recall as a child of the 90s and 2000s, that my local K-Mart was open 24/7. I remember this because one night my mom and I had both woken up in the middle of the night, and were watching tv struggling to fall back to sleep, so we went to K-Mart to see what it was like in the middle of the night.

With that said, I don't know who would go to K-Mart at 8:30PM.

You dont do any of that, for one, or you do it under a fake name.

It was also probally easier 24 years than it is now. No cellphones, no social media, very basic digital cameras, almost no survelance cameras.

He could be the guy that raised three kids while the mom dipped. And here you are just asking questions. There's definitely nothing wrong with the parent who abdicated their responsibility no - must be that husband that's bad.

They are suggesting that the husband could have been abusive, and that was the motivation to disappear

The guy before me said what she did "was pretty fucked up"; I'm saying there are multiple sides to this story, and we know pretty much none of them. I'm saying that she stayed with him for 20+ years and there's must've been a reason she left when she did.

😳

So is the side where she abandons her 14 years old daughter with an abusive father the good one? Never the 8 years old boy.

Kmart used to close at 10 when I was in my teens. But that was 25+ years ago.

"You wouldn't believe the line I had to wait in for Tickle Me Elmo."

Cellphones existed in 2002. They weren't smart phones, but we had mobile cellular devices. And MySpace. That was only a few years out from Twitter and Digg being released.

You're talking like it was 1970...

I know what they are suggesting. I'm calling it out. We've an article describing how one parent abdicated their responsibility and folks go - without additional info, as one reply says - immediately into blaming the husband.

Men are shitty idiots who cause a lot of problems. Source: am man

Good catch. I should have said smart phones. Cellphones were around, but think calls/basic texting, no cameras, no internet, no GPS.

It was still somewhat common to not have a cellphone back then, so tracking people was not so ubiquitous as it is now.

Myspace launched in 2003, so it didnt exist. Friendster technically did, as it looks like it launced in march, 2002. Id still say that no, there was no social media of note in 2002, unless you want to talk about usenet/IRC. Neither of the latter were in common use or likely to help assist you finding someone who didnt want to be found.

Men can be shitty idiots, but I would just say humans as a whole can be shitty idiots. I've known a few from both sides.

My dad worked at a social media start-up in 1999, but I guess it didn't catch on

The Jingle All the Way/28 Years Later crossover we never knew we needed.

...Have you considered the possibility of a sampling bias at play?

I recently read a book where a "missing" character reappeared and the main characters had to confront her. Both knew/learnt during the books of her betraying them and being generally a shitty human being.

I was expecting a long speech, "my side of the story", them finding closure with comprehension and maybe opening the door for a reconciliation, but was happy to see there was nothing like that, just "glad to see you're alive, we don't need you in our lives anymore, bye".

The fact that one character was a talking cat with a tiara didn't make it any less impactful.

The best for them would be to just have moved on and never found her, the second best would have been to not care anymore.

Camera phones existed, but were very uncommon. Same with GPS. Nokia "candy bar" phones were the most common at the time.. It looks like 2002 was when nokia first added GPS to its phones.

I think you've mashed 2000-2010 together into one big "cellphones had cameras and GPS before smartphones" year in your head. They were still very basic in 2002, most barely having web browsers.

All of this glosses over the fact that cellphones were not ubiqoutus in 2002, and the ones that people used at the time rarely had camera/GPS, much less any concept of a "phone app" or "social media." It would have been much easier to "get lost" both actively and passivly back then because you werent surrounded by people brandishing data harvesting/broadcasting devices all around you.

So you owned an uncommon phone with uncommon features in 2002, and youre using this to assert that these features were common at the time?

At a time when only 20-30% of people had cellphones, having one of the 5% of those cellphones with a camera or GPS was pretty uncommon. It means at any given point, less than 1% of people would be able to take your picture, much less post it to the "nowhere" that was social media at the time.