San Francisco police have decided to reinvestigate the 1984 disappearance of a 10-year-old boy, Kevin Collins.
At a press conference Wednesday, San Francisco police chief Greg Suhr declared that they have "person of interest" in the 1984 abduction of Kevin Collins. According to the missing posters released in 1984, the child was last seen at the corner of Haight and Masonic waiting for a northernbound bus; and may have got down at Presidio and Sutter.
Suhr said that a man identified as Wayne Jackson was questioned and his home searched after the disappearance of Collins. He fit the description of a tall, blonde man with a large black dog who was seen talking to the boy shortly before he vanished, the Associated Press reports.
Jackson already had a police record of serving six months in jail for abducting and engaging in a lewd act with a 7-year-old boy. According to Reuters, Jackson lived across the street from the Catholic grammar school that Collins attended in the Haight-Ashbury District and went by five aliases. He had a history of sex crimes against children and died in 2008, police said.
Collins' face was one of the earliest to be put on the back of a milk carton across the country in the search for missing children, repoted NBC Bay Area. Collins' disappearance caught nationwide attention.
"It was a landmark case," professor David Finklehor, director of the University of New Hampshire's Crimes against Children Research Center told San Francisco Chronicle. "It became a template for families with missing children on how to mobilize the community to assist and go beyond what law enforcement typically did back then."
Police said that they would "love to find the whereabouts of that little boy." Suhr said. "What we're looking for now is anybody that saw this guy (Jackson) in 1984, anybody that talked to this guy back in 1984, anybody that talked to somebody that talked to this guy back in 1984."
