A group of Ohio activists is betting on an unusual tool to help find new leads in missing persons cases – playing-card sets that will be distributed to local jail inmates.
Cleveland Missing, a nonprofit focused on helping families of missing persons, created a deck of cards featuring 52 cases from northern Ohio.
“We picked cold cases, and tried to stay between (year) 2000 to 2017 or 2019. We wanted them to be older cases that don’t have a lot of traction anymore,” Devan Althen told Fox News Digital.
“And so from there, we narrowed it down by the ones that had the most details to be able to give out there and then picked ones where the families are still actively looking for them… I really wanted to honor those families as much as I could.”
OVER 1,000 MINORS REPORTED MISSING BY CLEVELAND THIS YEAR, INCLUDING ALMOST 50 KIDS THIS MONTH
Devan Althen, a law enforcement liaison with the nonprofit Cleveland Missing, holds up two cards.
Althen, the law enforcement liaison for Cleveland Missing, spearheaded the project – applying for the grant, creating the deck and distributing the sets to northern Ohio jails near the incident locations.
Each card includes a picture of the missing person, their age, when they went missing and the latest information law enforcement released, along with Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation’s tip line.
DOZENS OF KIDS REPORTED MISSING IN CLEVELAND AREA AS POLICE PROBE ALARMING TREND
The playing cards are free and given to inmates because they likely either know about crimes that happened in their community, or even got away with a crime, Althen said.
“We all know that inmates love to talk, and so the hope is that while inmates are playing with these cards, it triggers memories that they might have surrounding cases in these cards,” Althen said.
“And a lot of times too, it’s not (the inmate saying), ‘I know what happened to the girl on Jack of Hearts.’ It’s hearing other inmates make comments about a case on a card and sharing what the other inmates said with the hope of getting time off their sentence.”
Devan Althen, the law enforcement liaison for Cleveland Missing, spearheaded the project.
