When is a person considered ‘missing’?

CLAY and CALHOUN COUNTY, Miss. (WCBI) – A woman in Calhoun County is found safe after she’s been missing since Sunday.

Bruce police say she was found Tuesday morning.

Winston County and West Point investigators hope to have the same outcome in their current missing person cases.

A lot of unanswered questions come with these investigations, so when does the red flag go up for investigators to label a person missing?

Where are they?

What happened?

Those are the answers law enforcement are working to find out about a missing woman in Winston county and a missing man in West Point.

Details and facts about the person are key when it comes to locating the individual.

When does one’s face start popping up on social media or TV screens as a missing person?

Recently, we’ve seen Desiree Eaves of Winston County and Rahman Hernandez of West Point, fall under the category.

“They haven’t been seen by the family, so there is some major concerns and our TV outlets and media always work good with us. We try to get information to them. It’s not information we’re going to sit on very long. We’re going to do our preliminary stuff to see if we can find them ourselves. As I said, about social media, cell phones, if we can’t, we’re fixing to start reaching out to the community to help,” says Clay County Sheriff Eddie Scott.

That’s what Bruce officers did in their recent missing person case.

Felicia Buggs’s family filed a report with police when she didn’t return home from one of her daily walks.

“We were contacted around five yesterday evening from the family saying they haven’t seen her since Sunday, around 1 p.m. The young lady does go out and walk a lot, she walks all over Bruce, but it’s unlikely for her to be gone that long. So, we looked for her and ended up finding her this morning. She was walking down the road and said that she had got lost,” says Bruce Assistant Police Chief Bryan Roberts.

Something out of character or behavior, or an unknown location can be the start to these investigations.

Scott says it’s not uncommon for his office to get missing person reports.

“Our investigators start rolling. We’ll start trying to find their last location, checking cell phone location, and in a lot of cases, it will come up that this person is not really missing and that they just wanted to be where they’re at, and if they’re of legal age, you know, we can’t make them come home.”

Scott says just like missing cases have different faces, they also have different circumstances surrounding the situations.

“It’s hard to have just a playbook to go by. You just have to kind of take it by the fly and start talking with people and trying to find out exactly what’s going on in the case.”

The sheriff has worked a number of investigations dealing with missing people and fortunately, most have been found safe.

He says the experience has triggered him to catch suspicious signs, like the case across the country in Colorado, involving this missing mother.

“In the case of somebody that has a one-year-old child, two-year-old child, there’s not many moms who are going to up and leave their child like that, so that automatically would send a red flag up to me, you know, that hey, something is not quite right here.”

Scott says you can file a missing person report at any time.

He also says community involvement and federal resources are huge assets in missing person investigations.