Cheeks wet with tears, Tracey Bradley wondered aloud how her daughters would look today.
Her daughters Tionda and Diamond were 10 and 3, respectively, when they were reported missing in July 2001.
Nearly 25 years later, Bradley wishes she could see them now. If she did, she knows she’d recognize them, she said.
“I wouldn’t know how they look today,” she said. “But if I would see them today, you know, a mother has intuition, and knows that that’s their child.”
While many Chicago moms spent Sunday enjoying the spring weather and being pampered by their loved ones, Bradley and others spent Mother’s Day missing the children who gave them that title.
Bradley, La Shann Walker and Karen Phillips, all mothers of missing persons, gathered at a South Loop press conference begging for answers about where their children were.
Phillips, whose daughter postal worker Kierra Coles was reported missing in 2018, says her daughter’s case and other missing persons cases need more attention from the city. Coles was 26 and three months’ pregnant when she was last seen leaving her apartment near 82nd Street and Coles Avenue in South Chicago, according to Chicago police.
For Phillips, Mother’s Day comes with loaded emotions.
“I was waiting to see my daughter experience motherhood, and now I may never get a chance to see that,” she said, adding that Coles wanted kids and would have been the last one in her family to become a parent.
Coles loved to dance and was interested in makeup. She was an aspiring broadcaster, and her mom says she gave great advice and would have made a good therapist.
Walker’s daughter Diamond Bynum was 21 when she was reported missing in 2015 with her 2-year-old nephew, King Walker, from their home near Fifth Avenue and Matthews Street in Gary, Indiana, according to the Northwest Indiana Major Crimes Task Force.
Bynum, who has a developmental condition called Prader-Willi syndrome, loved helping people and acted as a second mother to King, often making his bottles or helping with diaper changes, Walker said. King was a happy toddler who joked and laughed with his family often, she said.
Walker carries a strange sense of envy for mothers of children who have died — there’s a finality to death that she hasn’t gotten.
“The fact that at least most people get to bury their [loved ones], we didn’t get to do any of that,” she said. “We don’t know if they’re still here, or they’re not, or if someone is just harming them, if they’re just somewhere being tortured. We don’t know anything.”
The moms, who hold a press conference about their children on Mother’s Day every year, hope this is the last one.
“I feel like I’m their voices,” Bradley said. “And it just hurts, the fact that I have to continue to do this over and over and over again.”