Age progression art
``There's no way, other than with that picture, we could have found her. She had been moved around - every year a different address,'' says Nick Pittman, detective with the Oklahoma City police. ``This child had a fictitious name, a fictitious date of birth. A 10-year-old girl was found in Oklahoma City after seven years on the missing list. ``But that doesn't mean they're safe,'' says Barrows, citing various cases where parent abductors have been linked to drugs, crime, or child abuse.Ī medical illustrator by profession, Barrows's artistry brought together an even more complex jigsaw that had pieces strewn throughout the Southwest. It's not uncommon for children to be abducted by the parent who lost custody. The age progression - that's the only thing she was identified from,'' explains Hayden. ``Without Scott, we wouldn't have found that girl. From that clue, Hayden tracked the missing Maria to a Chicago school. ``That's Maria,'' she announced matter-of-factly, telling that Maria (name changed by request) sometimes stayed in Elgin on weekends. Then a break - a little girl peeked at the picture while her teacher talked with Hayden.
No one looking the least like Barrows's drawing was enrolled in Elgin schools. That, he managed.Īrmed with the picture, Officer Hayden dogged the Elgin district, school to school, principal to principal, teacher to teacher for more than a month. The first challenge, though, belonged to Barrows: Transform the small and grainy snapshot of a two year old into a girl of nine. ``We really had no idea if she was out there - a slim possibility,'' says Timothy Hayden of the Addison police. Tips and anonymous phone calls are all part of the scenario when children are missing. Then the mother, a resident of Addison, Ill., received word that her daughter might be in nearby Elgin. Seven years passed, and optimism stood at zero. Take the case of the two-year-old Mexican-American child who disappeared from the Chicago area. And Barrows's portraits played the major role in six of the recoveries.
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Of the 40 already circulated as handbills, posters, and on TV spots, 16 youngsters have been found alive. They boiled this bundle of complexities down to a 45-page text that charts the average growth rates of 60 facial features for young people - thousands of statistics in all. The Barrows/Sadler system is based on plastic surgeons' measurements, dental data, anthropological information, and their own extrapolations. Three years ago, Barrows and his colleague, Lewis Sadler, devised a way to add age to the photographed faces of children and adolescents, handing hope to parents whose youngsters have been missing a long time.
But Barrows is better than pretty good at this new technique of age progression. All the artist has to go on is an old photo. Barrows's job to ferret out what the youth might look like four years later. That Texas teen hasn't been seen since 1984 when he disappeared near his parents' Colorado vacation home - a ``stranger abduction'' statistic in FBI files. And that's not easy, because there's no model posing for this portrait. The artist is precise, measuring and remeasuring with his metric ruler. Slowly, the face of a Texas teen takes shape on his paper: Eyes.