Monday, February 26, 2007
Distraught mom won’t give up search - MISSING DAUGHTER: Jessie, 22, disappeared without a trace in Las Vegas a year ago
The (Vancouver) Province by Salim Jiwa
KAMLOOPS – A tormented mom is on a single-minded mission to find her 22-year-old daughter who disappeared without a trace in Las Vegas almost a year ago.
“If I stopped, do you know, there would be not one person looking for Jessie on a daily basis,” said Glendene Grant, who spends every waking hour of every day searching for her daughter Jessie Foster, who disappeared last March 28.
Grant believes Jessie, a former Boston Pizza waitress, has fallen into the hands of human traffickers.
“Jessie is a real family person,” Grant said. “No one believes Jessie took off willingly or anything like that. We all believe she is being held against her will, as a sex-slave somewhere. It may be in Las Vegas, or another state or even another country.”
Jessie’s Jamaican boyfriend, Peter Todd, is believed to be the last person to have seen her.
He claims in a web profile: I don’t do black girls…only snow bunnies.”
Jessie’s bank account with $10,000 in it is still untouched, her credit cards are unused and her car is parked at the back of her mom’s home in Kamloops. There is no answer on her cellphone. She did not phone home at Christmas.
At Grant’s modest single-story home a visitor is greeted by a missing-person poster on the white picket fence, another o the door, another as wallpaper o the computer screen and a picture of the missing blond on the fridge.
“Dwight (Jessie’s father lives in Calgary), does what he can, but he has already mourned Jessie and put her to rest as a dead daughter in his heart, so he is looking for his dead child’s body,” said the determined Mom PI.
“I am looking for Jessie alive, come home, write a book, be on Oprah and make a movie.”
Tired of inaction from Las Vegas police, Grant stormed into Vegas last month with an entourage of media in tow and confronted the attorney-general of Nevada, the mayor of Las Vegas, police and even Todd, the former boyfriend.
Her stubborn pursuit resulted I a five-page cover story in City Life, a magazine that sits in boxes at every street corner. The front cover had a life-sized picture of Jessie’s face and the headline asked, “Where’s Jessie?”
That prompted action from the Las Vegas police.
“I’ve read the article from LV City Life and your e-mail message,” Terri Miller, the director of the department’s Anti Trafficking League Against Slavery, said in an e-mail to Grant.
“I think there are human-trafficking indicators in your daughter’s case. Do you know what she was doing in Miami, New York and Atlantic City? Those are all cities considered to be hubs for human trafficking. There are actually circuits of prostitution rings that operate out of and into those cities, including Las Vegas.
“I desperately want to help you find some answers.”
In a second e-mail last week, Miller said she has asked detectives to investigate the disappearance as a possible human-trafficking crime.
“I proposed looking at the case through the scope of human trafficking, which they are acutely aware of now,” she said.
Meanwhile, Grant continues to flood the Internet with pleas for information, writing to TV shows and even stopping strangers to introduce herself as the mom of missing Jessie Foster.
sjiwa@png.canwest.com
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