Dinorah Perry went to Panama on the anniversary of Baby Monica’s disappearance (Feb 5, 2009).  She held a candle light vigil in the streets of Arrajan Panama.  On that day, Atty Milwood (The Family’s Attorney) announced the arrest of the suspects. A video of the vigil is coming soon.

(Google Video) - This is footage from 2007 that takes place in a Florida prison. Dinorah Perry of Missing Children International Ministries interviews Willis Rambo, who was convicted and sentenced to life for the sexual abuse of his stepdaughters.

(Google Video) - During a 2007 interview in Florida, Dinorah Perry of Missing Children International Ministries speaks with Florida death row inmate Willie Crane, Jr., who was convicted for the kidnapping and killing of 8 year old Amanda Brown. The body still has not been found.

By KIM SKORNOGOSKI

Tribune Staff Writer

Hoping for help in finding abducted children, a Florida woman spent three days talking to Nathan Bar-Jonah in Montana State Prison in Deer Lodge.

The convicted child molester, who is serving a 130-year sentence, talked about growing up in Massachusetts and his dream to run a halfway house for sex offenders. He also gave advice to parents on how to protect children from sexual predators.

But throughout the conversations, Bar-Jonah maintained he had nothing to do with the disappearance of 10-year-old Zachary Ramsay from Great Falls in 1996. Although Bar-Jonah was never convicted in that case, police allegations that he kidnapped, killed and cannibalized the boy captured international media attention.

Dinora Perry, the founder of Missing Children International Ministries, talked with Bar-Jonah in July. She videotaped the interview and recently shared the tape with the Tribune.

Prison spokeswoman Linda Moodry said despite the interest in the gruesome crime, Bar-Jonah has done only a few interviews.

“People have requested interviews of him, but he has not wanted to do them,” she said.

In December 2004, Bar-Jonah agreed to talk to the Tribune for a fee. No interview took place because the newspaper’s policy is not to pay for access to news sources. Perry said she was not asked to pay fees to Bar-Jonah and he placed no restrictions on what they could discuss.

Though the Ramsay charges were dropped, police still suspect Bar-Jonah abducted the boy.

The 48-year-old has been in Montana State Prison since April 2002, sentenced to 130 years without parole for kidnapping, sexual assault and assault with a weapon. Those charges stemmed from abusing a Great Falls teen and his 12-year-old cousin.

Bar-Jonah hasn’t had any disciplinary problems in prison and hasn’t been involved with any assaults in prison, Moodry said.

He has a cell to himself in maximum security and doesn’t have a job in the prison.

“He gets out for an hour to exercise and he has TV to watch in his cell,” she said. “He tends to himself and kind of stays low-key.”

Before that, Bar-Jonah spent years in the Cascade County regional jail after police spotted him dressed like an officer near Lincoln Elementary and arrested him in December 1999.

During his years in jail, Bar-Jonah has collected and reviewed police reports to come up with his own theories explaining Zach Ramsay’s disappearance.

He is working on a book about the case, tentatively titled “Who Done It or Did ZR Runneth?”

“Because we just don’t know what happened to him,” Bar-Jonah said in the videotaped interview with Perry.

“There’s just so many different ways it could have gone,” Bar-Jonah said. “I mean, through all the police reports I have, I even came up with a thing where he could have possibly run away.”

Bar-Jonah said he has signed an exclusive contract with an East Coast communications company for movie rights to his life story.

Perry said in all her off-camera conversations with Bar-Jonah, he never waivers in his innocence.

“Out of all the missing children I showed and discussed with Nate, his heart only went out for Zach Ramsay,” she said.

Bar-Jonah asked her to contact Zach’s mother, Rachel Howard, and recruit her to join the ministries’ group Parents Against Kidnapping. Perry said he gave her Howard’s name and hometown along with her relatives’ names and where they could be found.

“For some reason, he is very concerned about Zach’s mother,” she said.

Howard’s insistence that her son is alive was among factors that led prosecutors to drop the homicide charge against Bar-Jonah in October 2002.

Investigators also lacked physical evidence to link Bar-Jonah to Ramsay. The child’s body was never found. Although officers dug up Bar-Jonah’s garage and found crushed bones buried there, DNA tests showed they weren’t Ramsay’s.

Perry did not question Bar-Jonah about the bones fragments, and their source remains a mystery.

Bar-Jonah never said Ramsay’s name throughout the interview, saying his initials once, but usually referring to him as the “missing boy I was charged with.”

Other theories

He said police didn’t investigate links between Ramsay’s disappearance and other missing children around that time.

One man who admitted to kidnapping and tying up a boy in Alberta was particularly suspect, Bar-Jonah said.

He did note that Ramsay would have graduated from high school by now and showed sympathy to Zach’s mother.

“I feel so bad for her,” Bar-Jonah said. “I mean, the police just dragged her through the coals so bad. She bent over backwards to help them and they just treated her like crap.”

Bar-Jonah also said the only way to find missing children like Ramsay is by accident.

“You could offer money, but a lot of (sex offenders) are probably thinking if I give up a child they might put me to death,” he said.

The only way to get them to talk is if they feel guilty or through prayer, he said. And as long as psychiatrists are required to report new crimes, many children will remain missing.

“Maybe that sex offender that committed a murder doesn’t remember he did it,” he said.

“You mean he has amnesia?” Perry asked him.

“Or it’s been so long that he doesn’t remember exactly where he hid it,” Bar-Jonah said. “It could be over a 50-mile radius.”

Help for parents

Bar-Jonah spent much of the interview giving advice to parents to protect their kids.

He said parents should start early telling their kids not to take money or toys from strangers. If he had children, Bar-Jonah said he wouldn’t let anyone baby-sit without references.

Parents should suspect if adult neighbors and friends want to spend time with their children.

“I personally wouldn’t go to a person’s house, even if I’ve known them for 10 years and ask them if I could spend time with their kids,” he said.

While living in Great Falls, Bar-Jonah was known to frequently befriend his neighbor’s children. He baby-sat the children he was convicted of molesting and assaulting. And he sold toys out of his garage.

Bar-Jonah also said he supported the Missing Children International Ministries program that got parents to patrol bus stops.

He was convicted of dressing like a police officer and grabbing two boys outside a Massachusetts movie theater. He was charged with getting into a car with another Massachusetts boy whose mother had run into the post office.

Ramsay vanished walking a few blocks to school.

Bar-Jonah suggested that parents could use the same technology used to track criminals who are out on parole to monitor their own children.

“Children should have a device planted inside their skins, in their hats or in their jewelry to track them down in case they go missing,” he said. “Train them at age 2 about the dangers of child abductions, just like you would teach them how to ride a bike or how to swim.”

Bar-Jonah said sex offenders target kids because they’re easier to control.

He also said children who are abducted should never give up hope for escape, even if they are tied down and gagged.

“Have you ever tried catching a child? Kids wiggle. There’s a possibility they can wiggle out of tape. Some kids cowardly sit in a corner and other kids create ways to get out of things.”

Growing up

Bar-Jonah said he was a victim as a child.

As early as age 8, a strange man pushed him into a contaminated river near his home.

When he was 10, he was playing ball with a 7-year-old friend when a group of eight neighborhood boys attacked them, he said.

Six people held him down, while the others poured gasoline on his friend and threw matches at him. Bar-Jonah said he broke free and started beating up one of the other boys.

That’s when the boys attacked him and raped him.

“At age 10, I started acting like a teenager,” he said. After that he would go fishing by himself and was unruly.

Bar-Jonah said he beat up one of the younger boys who attacked him and when his father found out, he beat Bar-Jonah — then known by his given name of David Brown — with a belt.

“That was the first time that my father spanked me that I didn’t cry,” he said.

Bar-Jonah said he didn’t tell anyone what happened to him for 22 years. That was when eight prison guards back East raped him on a bloody mattress, he said.

He also shared a few fond memories of climbing through rocky crevices near his home and of working with young kids as a teenager in a Christian scout group.

Bar-Jonah spoke with disdain about his deceased father, but said he stays close with his mother, who lives in Massachusetts with his sister.

He calls her once a month, giving her money for the collect phone calls.

Helping sex offenders

The 14 years he spent in prison and in a mental hospital for kidnapping and choking two Massachusetts boys helped him develop a sixth sense for spotting sex offenders.

“The only way I survived is I could identify people if they were going to be aggressive,” he said.

Bar-Jonah said in his estimation one in five sex offenders will always be dangerous and need to stay locked up.

He excludes himself from that group.

When asked if he would hurt anyone if could walk out of jail, Bar-Jonah said, “No. Absolutely not. But there’s no way I could ever be in normal society. They’d have to find a deserted island where nobody knows me.”

Though his sentence is without parole and he’s lost his appeals to the Montana Supreme Court, Bar-Jonah said his dream is to run a halfway house exclusively for sex offenders.

Perhaps a church, or several churches, could buy an old downtown building, he said, and make it secure so no one could escape.

The sex offenders could work in a restaurant attached to the building, never interacting with the public. That way they could make a little money to buy things, but they’d have to shop with a buddy to stay out of trouble.

“That would be dynamite.”

Perry asked Bar-Jonah if he had anything to say to sex offenders. He faced the camera directly and told them to “stop it.”

“All you have to do is say where the body is. That way at least you have a clearer conscience,” he went on to say. “You guys need to get help. There are plenty of psychiatrists to talk to. You need help.”

BY JACK DOLAN
jdolan@MiamiHerald.com

(Miami Herald) - Some church groups devote their weekends to bake sales. Some play bingo. Others dive into gloomy canals in the pouring rain, searching for human remains.

Saturday, volunteer divers for Missing Children Ministries International came up empty-handed after hours of searching through the murky water and deep silt at the bottom of a nondescript canal just west of Hiatus Road near Oakland Park Boulevard in Sunrise.

Most people would drive by the canal without noticing it. But Dinorah Perry, founder of Missing Children Ministries, based in Pembroke Pines, said she spotted a gap in the guard rail that stirred her darkest fears.

Among the dozen people watching the search from the canal’s bank was Ethel Mitchell, 76, of Fort Lauderdale. Her grandson disappeared in 1983, when he was 16. There was no real reason to think he — or anyone else — would be down there, she conceded. But she was grateful to the ministry for making the effort.

”It would bring closure, regardless of how they might find him,” Mitchell said.

Perry said she was inspired to search for missing children in 1995, when she watched Jimmy Ryce’s father break down and beg for help during a television interview as police hunted for his kidnapped son.

The infamous case ended when they found the boy’s dismembered body buried in a series of garden planters.

”In order to do this, I have to think like the crazy people,” Perry said. “I’m scared of people. You don’t know what they can do.”

And yet, people seem drawn to Perry. Volunteers delivered pizza. Police corralled traffic. An ambulance sat nearby, just in case.

Derek Borrero, from Homestead, is a Scuba instructor with an interest in underwater crime-scene investigation who volunteered to help Perry.

TAKING THE PLUNGE

On Saturday, he stood in the driving rain on the canal’s east bank holding one end of a guide rope. A partner held the other end on the west bank. Clinging to the rope, beneath the surface, were three divers, including Borrero’s son Jonathan.

Not long into the search, Jonathan lost his mask. It vanished into the silt. It didn’t matter, he said. The water was so cloudy that he couldn’t see much anyway.

Instead of relying on their eyes, the divers shimmied along the bottom, probing in front of themselves with a three-foot-long section of PVC pipe not much thicker than a conductor’s wand.

”That’s also for alligators,” said the elder Borrero, “so they don’t just stick their hands in its mouth.”

He communicates with the divers through the rope. Two tugs means they have found something; four tugs is a cry for help.

Kevin Garvey, a trapper for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, sat nearby in his truck. ”This canal’s well-known for alligators,” he said. “I took one out two days before Easter, 13 feet and at least a thousand pounds.”

But he offered these words of assurance for the divers on the bottom: “Pretty much the majority of the time they do their attacking above the surface.”

Perry got the idea to focus on canal searches in 2006 after divers hired by Mathew Stirling’s family discovered the missing teen’s body still strapped in the driver’s seat of his Ford 150 pickup at the bottom of the canal along U.S. 27 near Griffin Road.

Dozens of other cars were submerged there, too. Stirling’s family, joined by Perry, pressured the Broward Sheriff’s Office to pull them out. No other bodies turned up, but many of the vehicles had been reported stolen, police discovered.

YIELDING SECRETS

Since then, McManus and Perry decided that South Florida’s canals — many of them as deep as 15 feet — must surrender their secrets. If police can’t do it, or won’t, than the women resolved to do it themselves.

On Saturday, after five hours searching several hundred yards of the canal, they found a motorcycle, a golf cart, a six-foot section of guardrail and one ”very small” alligator, which moved away quickly, said the younger Borrero.

Perry called the day a success. “We’re absolutely going to keep doing it. That way, at least we’ll know what’s in these canals.”

Original Article

Carol Allard, who lives in East Hartford, Conn., still agonizes about her son, who vanished while staying with relatives in South Miami-Dade.

Original Link

Bill Wade/Post-Gazette
Robert Stewart, father of Jean Marie Stewart, who disapeared in 1980.

The night before she was to leave, her friends had a going-away party for her. A friend picked her up to bring her back to the house when she wanted to stop at the convenience store. The friend went in to make her purchase, as she had already removed her shoes. He was inside only minutes (there were no other customers), and when he returned, she was gone. Her purse, shoes and money were all still in the car. She never returned to the house to get money, ticket or other belongings. Foul play is suspected in her disappearance.

– The Doe Network

“She was out of control,” recalled her father, Robert E. Stewart. “I think I was pretty broken down, to be honest with you.”

Jean Marie Stewart, age 11, left, and age 16.

In the summer of 1978 when Jean was 15, Mr. Stewart agreed to what he viewed as a last-ditch plan. He signed paperwork to allow her to move in with her boyfriend’s family in Miami Lakes, Fla. Jean’s mother, Mr. Stewart’s ex-wife, Jean Hahalyak, said she argued with her daughter for taking up with a boyfriend several years older but could not dissuade her from leaving.

Jean visited home twice the next year. On March 25, 1980, the eve of what would have been another trip home — this time to celebrate her 17th birthday — she vanished.

That night, Jean attended a going-away party. She drove home with her boyfriend. They stopped at a convenience store. He went inside; when he returned, Jean was gone, never to be heard from again.

“She didn’t want to be here,” Mr. Stewart, 75, of Mt. Lebanon said this week. “She wanted to be there with him, all the way until her death.”

– Florida Unidentified Decedents Database

Mr. Stewart also contacted Therese Rocco, then a Pittsburgh police captain who oversaw the bureau’s missing persons squad.

As part of her investigation, Ms. Rocco sent Jean’s dental records to Miami Lakes, nearby Hialeah and other places in the nation that spring. Nothing came of her efforts.

About 13 months after Jean disappeared, human remains were discovered in a remote field in Hialeah, a city of about 250,000 adjacent to Miami Lakes. They went to the local medical examiner’s office and became Case No. 1981-01253.

They would go unidentified for 26 years.

It was her mother who took in Jean. It was her brother, David Nolle, who was identified by Mr. Stewart and Mrs. Hahalyak as Jean’s boyfriend, though Ms. Halleck believed they were only friends.

Ms. Halleck, 54, an artist who lives in South Carolina, said she was fond of Jean, whom she recalled as a headstrong, beautiful girl with modeling aspirations.

“She was a typical 16-year-old. The grass is always greener. Somebody else’s rules were always better. She loved her family dearly,” Ms. Halleck said. “They loved their daughter and wanted her happy. Jean was just the typical troubled teen in that sense, even with us. We had difficulties getting her to school. She’d walk in the front door and walk out the back door.”

On the night of the party, Ms. Halleck said her brother chauffeured Jean in their stepfather’s new Cadillac. On the way home, they stopped about a block from their house to buy cigarettes. Jean, who often didn’t wear shoes, could not go in because she was barefoot.

“He walked in and walked out, and she was gone,” Ms. Halleck said.

Mr. Stewart said he heard a slightly different story from Mr. Nolle’s mother, that Jean and Mr. Nolle had argued and she ran out of the car when he stopped to buy cigarettes.

By then, the relationship between the two had soured, Mr. Stewart said. During a phone call the day she disappeared, Mr. Stewart said Mr. Nolle made it clear he wanted Jean to move back to Pittsburgh for good.

Ms. Halleck said her brother called the family immediately, and she and her siblings — seven of them in all — scoured the area to no avail.

“I was all over the place trying to find her. There was no Internet. I was calling medical centers, calling hospitals, calling juvenile detention centers. I mean I covered everything within 100 miles religiously,” Ms. Halleck said.

A man who answered the telephone at Mr. Nolle’s home yesterday said he was not available and hung up.

Ms. Halleck eventually became involved with volunteer groups that search for missing persons by trolling for information and passing it along to investigators. In March 2006, she started Porchlight for the Missing and Unidentified, a Web site dedicated to Jean’s memory.

“I just couldn’t let her go. I felt like somebody needed to be her voice,” Ms. Halleck said. “It started me on a lifelong quest.”

– Posting Aug. 22, 2005 by Lauran Halleck on websleuths.com

“Jean Marie’s background really took my attention because it said a girl on her way to Pennsylvania, and I said to myself, ‘That girl never made it out of Miami Lakes let alone Pennsylvania,’” Ms. Perry, 45, said.

“I knew in my heart that no one was working on Jean’s case so I just started yelling at every detective I could find that would listen to me.”

The case was reopened by the Miami-Dade Police Department. Lead investigator Detective Brigitte Robert credited Ms. Perry for her doggedness.

“Because you know what? If that didn’t happen, this possible match might have just gone into the case files,” Detective Robert said.

In late 2006, as part of a routine look at cold cases, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement asked Miami-Dade police to track down Jean’s parents and obtain DNA samples. Detective Robert did so. In December, she was assigned the case.

– Posting Dec. 5, 2007 by Ellen Leach on Porchlight.

On Nov. 10, a posting on the Doe Network about unidentified remains drew her attention.

There was more information on the Florida Unidentified Decedents Database, a Web site with information from the state’s medical examiners’ offices. That information was put online in April.

“It mentioned the overbite and that’s what caught my eye,” Ms. Leach said.

She checked the mileage between Miami Lakes and Hialeah and saw the communities were within a few miles of each other. She faxed Miami-Dade police. Detective Robert picked up a phone.

“She called me 45 minutes within faxing of it there. She was excited about the possible match and was gonna get it checked into,” Ms. Leach said.

Detective Robert contacted the Miami-Dade County Medical Examiner Department and provided Jean’s dental records. Police had them on file, but Detective Robert could not say when they first obtained them.

On Nov. 28, a positive match was made.

“I was elated,” Detective Robert said.

– Posting Dec. 5, 2007, by Lauran Halleck on websleuths.com.

Mrs. Hahalyak, 75, of Greenfield, said she’s been told her daughter might have been shot, but she knows little more than she did decades ago.

“I just figured something bad had to have happened to her, that her remains were in the ocean or something,” she said.

One of her current husband Eddie’s late brothers was a Pittsburgh police detective and another was an Allegheny County police officer, and as the years passed she drew comfort from their assurance: “Police keep working. They never give up on anything.”

“I’ve cried and prayed every day she’s been missing. She would have been a nice sister for my other kids.”

Detective Robert and Sgt. Ralph Nazario, who oversees the Hialeah police homicide squad, would not discuss the investigation, except that Sgt. Nazario said two detectives have been assigned to investigate. He would not say if they have identified a suspect or comment on past aspects of the case.

Mr. Stewart said he was glad to be rid “of the great pressure of just not knowing” what had happened to his daughter. “We want to see them get the culprit no matter who it is.”

Who killed Jean Marie Stewart? That is the biggest question of the case.

But there is another major question. If police in Florida had Jean’s dental records, if the remains of a young woman with an overbite were discovered only a few miles from where Jean disappeared a year later, why did it take more than a quarter-century for a volunteer advocate to put two and two together?

“It should have been solved in 1981,” said Ms. Rocco, who went on to become assistant chief of the Pittsburgh police and retired in 1994.

“That was the question we had,” Detective Robert said. “What happened? And we don’t have an answer.”

Though she has never met them, Dinorah Perry calls them “my kids.”

Guided by her faith, the Pembroke Pines mother, wife and real estate agent has launched a crusade on behalf of the young victims and the families that desperately want answers.

“They cry,” said Perry, 44. “They think the world has forgotten about their children, but I haven’t forgotten.”

Perry’s mission revolves around researching unsolved cases, many of them decades old, in hopes of uncovering information she can use to push investigators to try again.

She founded Missing Children International Ministries in 2004 and in the last year has persuaded detectives in Broward and Miami-Dade counties to re-examine three cases that were dubbed “inactive.”

She says she does it out of a genuine need to help but also prays that in return, God will protect her 8-year-old son, Maciah.

Perry’s quest began three years before he was born, with another family’s tragedy.

In 1995, a raw, tearful Don Ryce pleaded into TV news cameras for his only child, Jimmy — before detectives learned the boy had been abducted near his school bus stop, raped and dismembered. Juan Carlos Chavez, a ranch hand who lived near Jimmy’s bus stop, confessed to the crime and was sentenced to death in 1998.

“When I saw that man crying on TV begging for his son, it just broke my heart,” she said. “I told myself that one day I was going to track that man down and tell him I’m sorry.”

The case affected Perry so deeply that for years, while starting her real estate career and raising her son, she thought about creating a missing persons advocacy group but struggled to come up with a unique idea.

Eventually, Perry found her niche: a focus on cold cases, especially the ones that preceded DNA testing. She said she did eight years in Army intelligence but has no formal investigative training.

Still, she’s able to compile enough details on old missing persons cases from around the United States and other countries, using the Internet and police reports.

Lately, she has been researching from home and her real estate office. She carries the cases everywhere, on her mind and in thick manila folders.

“She takes these children as her own and becomes a voice for them,” said retired Hollywood police detective Susan Hayes, who volunteers with Perry’s group.

Perry recruited local active and retired police officers and detectives to meet every couple of months to brainstorm ideas on old missing child cases, in hopes of finding something new they could pass on to the lead investigator. The team met for the first time in September to review an Ocala case.

“I see the kind of work she’s done and her consistency,” said Pembroke Pines Police Officer Donna Velasquez, who was a missing persons detective when she met Perry in 2003. “We’ve built a sense of trust.”

Perry also tracks down relatives of the missing and encourages them to give police a DNA sample that could later be used to identify their loved one’s remains.

She writes to prison inmates around the country and knocks on doors in run-down neighborhoods looking for suspects named in old police reports.

Standing at about 5-foot-6 and with more charm than muscle, Perry’s style is more of a cautious probing for details than pushy or confrontational.

It’s how, in July 2005, she went to a Montana prison to interview a pedophile accused of killing and eating at least one of his victims. She asked the man how he abused children and what parents could do to better protect them.

What she learned from him and others helped launch several projects:

“Bus Stop Parents,” where she encourages moms and dads to take turns keeping an eye on school bus stops, which often are a target of sex offenders and abductors.

A children’s coloring book warning about abductors.

A call to state legislators to draft a law that would keep all unsolved missing person cases open for 150 years, an idea she got from seeing some murderers’ prison sentences that were just as long.

“If you can give it to them, why can’t you give it to my kids?” Perry asks.

It would be called the Paul Allard Act, named after a 14-year-old who went missing from southwest Miami-Dade while staying with relatives in August 1976.

It was the first case Perry got re-opened.

Allard’s family thinks he was abducted while trying to hitchhike home to Connecticut.

Before January, when the case was reopened, Miami-Dade police did not have a file on Allard because many pre-1978 reports were purged, Perry said.

Detectives have since collected DNA from Allard’s mother that could be used to identify his remains if they are ever found. Perry next began investigating the case of Shanythia “Nikki” Greene, who was 17 and a recent graduate of Blanche Ely High in Pompano Beach when she disappeared in August 1993.

Henrietta Greene couldn’t convince detectives that her daughter was not a runaway.

She had suspicions that two people she knew were involved, but police made no arrests.

At Perry’s insistence, detectives began looking into the case again in March.

“Nobody knows how hard it is not knowing,” Greene, 49, said through her tears. “To this day we haven’t heard one word. They haven’t had one lead,” she said of investigators.

Meeting Perry has given her new hope she might one day find out what happened to her only child.

“I really thank God for her,” Greene said.

The family of Leah Jean Van Schoick, 17, also had trouble getting law enforcement to pay attention.

In August 1982, Van Schoick’s family in New Jersey reported the teen missing from her home near Fort Lauderdale and from the Hallandale Beach bar where she worked, Perry said. Van Schoick had moved to South Florida to live with a biker. Her family grew worried when she stopped calling.

The Broward Sheriff’s Office and Hallandale Beach police had pieces of information, but neither agency was handling the full investigation, Perry said.

Perry said she contacted the Sheriff’s Office and, in June, a detective was assigned to the case.

It might not change a thing.

So, every night, Perry tells her son to pray for the missing.

She adds one for the families.

“I try to be strong for them,” Perry said.

Sofia Santana can be

reached at svsantana@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4631.