By Chris Fuchs
At a news conference at Borough Hall Monday, Arnita Fowler faulted the existing framework – which requires that the police search for a person between 18 and 65 only 24 hours after being reported missing – for the four years it took to learn that her son, La Mont Dottin, 21, had been buried in Potter's Field.
“I may have peace, but I have no closure,” she said, standing next to Claire Shulman, the borough president of Queens, who joined the conference midway through. “And I will not have closure until I see change. I don't want to be ignored anymore.”
In October 1995, Dottin left his home in Hollis to mail a package at a nearby post office but never returned. Initially, Fowler said she encountered a number of obstacles when she tried to report to the Police Department that her son was missing. Over the next four years, Fowler said, she kept in touch with the police, hoping that a new lead would surface.
Then in September 1999, one did. Her son, she learned, had been buried in Potter's Field on Hart Island, where bodies not identified at the morgue are interred. But most troubling for Fowler was this: She learned her son had, in fact, been identified four days after he was reported missing, his body having surfaced in the East River. Fowler said “foul play” had been suspected in his death.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation confirmed last year that Dottin's body had been identified through dental records in December 1995. The Police Department would not say whether it received this information or what may have happened to it. Last year Dottin's body was exhumed and is now interred at Calverton National Cemetery, in Riverhead, L.I.
“We will be in contact with the police on what Mrs. Fowler said,” Shulman told the news conference. “The communication between the services, the departments and other city agencies can be improved, and we'll see to it that it happens.”
Five months after a City Council hearing was held on the issue of how missing person cases are handled by the police, Councilman Sheldon Leffler (D-Hollis) sent a letter to Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik suggesting that improvements be made to the current departmental procedure.
Among those improvements, the councilman recommended that the Police Department immediately begin a search for a missing person once the report is made. He also said a “Missing Persons Specialist” should be created in each precinct, the department should compile a case study of mishandled cases to train officers and the department should make it clear to someone reporting a missing person that the NYPD does not automatically begin a search 24 hours after a report is made.
Several months ago Fowler set up the La Mont Dottin Foundation, Inc., a not-for-profit group, to track cases similar to her son's. Each year between 800 and 1,200 people are buried at Potter's Field, with 80 to 100 bodies disinterred, according to Capt. Gene Ruppert, a supervisor at the field.
Detective William Burnes, a police spokesman, said in an interview last month that the Police Department does in fact cross-check its missing persons records with that of Potters Field, but he could not say for how long the department has done so.
Several months ago, Fowler filed a $45 million lawsuit against the city for negligence, she said.
