By Kathianne Boniello
Arnita Fowler was surrounded by ghosts this week.
They followed her everywhere the St. Albans woman went as she recalled the days just prior to her only son's disappearance in 1995. This week marked the five-year anniversary that he vanished.
“On Monday, Oct. 16, he returned from the Million Man March,” Fowler said of her then 21-year-old son La Mont Dottin. “On Tuesday I informed him of his formal acceptance into Queens College.
“On Wednesday,” she said “I asked him to mail that package, and he never came back.”
Fowler's story became all the more poignant last year when she discovered that her son's body had been recovered by the New York Police Department four days after his disappearance. The agency revealed last year that while the family searched for Dottin, he had been identified through dental records but then buried in Potters Field on Hart Island without their knowledge.
It has been more than a year since Fowler and La Mont Dottin's father, Norman Dottin of Hempstead, L.I., were able to get their son's body exhumed from Hart Island and bring it home for a proper funeral and burial.
But while Fowler said she thinks about her son everyday, she has not spent this particular anniversary letting sadness take over her life. Instead, the St. Albans woman has been gearing up for the kickoff of a new foundation she has established to help families with missing relatives.
The La Mont Dottin Foundation Inc. has been created to provide a resource of information and help for those with missing relatives, Fowler said.
The foundation, she said, would “offer to you what was not offered to me.”
Eventually Fowler hopes the La Mont Dottin Foundation will be able to build a database of missing persons information to support and improve the city's records.
“It's about reform,” she said.
A fund-raising gala for the foundation was slated to be held at Thomasina restaurant at 205-35B Linden Blvd. in St. Albans at 8 p.m. on Oct. 28. State Sen. Malcom Smith (D-St. Albans) was scheduled as the event's featured speaker. Honorees include Rev. Stella Mercado, who presided at La Mont Dottin's funeral in September 1999, U.S. Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-St. Albans), and Democratic U.S. senate candidate and first lady Hillary Clinton.
Smith praised the creation of the foundation and said he was “very concerned about a situation where one can lose a child and have the government response be so pathetic. It's an idea whose time has definitely come.”
Fowler said one of the things that has helped her recover from her loss has been working as an assistant to Smith since the spring.
Public service, she said, was the only place for her to go.
“I wanted to be of service to someone,” she said of her choice to work for the state senator. “Not everyone knows how to fight.”
Fowler, a veteran of the military who moved back to Queens from California in 1997 to continue searching for her son, said she was determined to bring the new foundation to fruition despite her grief.
“This is a wake-up call,” she said “that no longer will people sit back and trust that you are searching for their loved ones.”
Anger still brims when Fowler talks about her four-year quest to discover what happened to La Mont Dottin, who left behind a daughter, Tiara Janae Keller, 8.
“If the missing person is between 17 and 65,” she said, “there's nothing that drives them to look for you. I get so frustrated – every meeting was initiated by me. Nobody even mentioned Potters Field.”
Fowler said she was never told that each borough had its own morgue or that her son's body could have been in any of them. She said while she spent months in the early days of her search at the NYPD's Missing Persons bureau, La Mont Dottin's body laid in the Manhattan morgue.
“It baffles me to this day,” she said.
Although the NYPD had found La-Mont Dottin's body washed ashore along the East River six days after his October 1995 disappearance and the FBI later identified his body, neither the federal agency nor the local police exchanged information on the case until last year, Fowler said.
At that time Fowler, who maintained weekly contact with the police since her son disappeared, had scheduled a meeting to go over her son's case. Just prior to the meeting, she said, the Missing Person's Unit made the call to the FBI that revealed La-Mont Dottin had died four years earlier.
As she considered the anniversary of her son's disappearance, Fowler said she thinks about him every day.
“I hear him, smell him, see him,” she said. “He's with me all the time. But the more I go through it, the more healing I go through. I'm glad to be here in my right mind.”
For more information on the La Mont Dottin Foundation, call 465-5125, or visit www.lamontdottinfoundation.com.
Reach reporter Kathianne Boniello by e-mail at Timesledgr@aol.com or call 229-0300, Ext. 146.