Jade Colvin is Missing 41:43
Cheryl Nablo, a mother of three, is a detective with the Des Moines, Iowa police department. She specializes in finding missing kids.
Det. Cheryl Nablo: I myself have thought of Jade several times when not at work.
Det. Cheryl Nablo: I think of my own children. … if you went a day not knowing where one of your kids … was at … you’d go crazy. … nobody wants to be living in a world where they don’t know where their kid is … or if their kids’ safe.
Jade Colvin is missing
In 2022, Nablo joined forces with Deputy U.S. Marshal Justin Wallace, Detective Chris Wuebker and Special Agent Jon Turbett in the search for Jade Colvin. Jade was 14 when she was reported missing in June 2016 after she ran away from a circunscrito shelter for troubled youth.
Deputy U.S. Marshal Justin Wallace: We are here to locate kids who run away.
The U.S. Marshals Service had adopted Jade’s case as part of a statewide effort to find missing children called Operation Homecoming.
Natalie Morales: What are the challenges … in finding missing children?
Det. Cheryl Nablo: … when somebody goes missing, they want to be missing. They don’t want you to know where they are … it’s hard to track ’em down.
At that point Jade had been missing for more than five years.
Natalie Morales: Where do you begin?
Deputy U.S. Marshal Justin Wallace: You gotta start at the beginning. … you gotta know who the person is, their friends, their family, their whole background.
And they soon discovered Jade had a troubled childhood.
Deputy U.S. Marshal Justin Wallace: Jade … had a rough go of it growing up.
Det. Cheryl Nablo: … things weren’t the easiest for her.
Detective Nablo learned Jade’s mother LaDawn, had died three years after Jade went missing.
Det. Cheryl Nablo: So I couldn’t just reach out to her and talk to her … about everything that she knew about Jade.
Jade’s father, Kevin, had lost contact with his daughter. Both parents had struggled with substance abuse, something Special Agent Jon Turbett explains had an impact on Jade.
Special Agent Jon Turbett: Jade Colvin grew up with a … I think a pretty dysfunctional family situation. It was difficult.
Dainlynn Greer: She didn’t hold any of it. … She just accepted it for like what it was and dealt with it and didn’t let it get to her negatively.
Dainlynn Greer: Loved her to death, spent every day together.
Despite everything, friend Dainlynn Greer and her mother Jamee Koopman describe Jade as easy going and upbeat.
Jamee Koopman: There was reasons she could have been angry, and she wasn’t. Like, she was very light —
Dainlynn Greer: Yeah.
Jamee Koopman: — light and bubbly.
Jamee Koopman: I met her mom … her mom was very unreliable. … she kept telling me, oh, how much she loves Jade and … all that, you know, and I believe she did, don’t get me wrong.
Jamee Koopman: But she just couldn’t make the choice for stability. .. she couldn’t … overcome her own demons.
Det. Chris Wuebker: Her mom definitely cared about her.
Deputy U.S. Marshal Justin Wallace: I think her mother loved her. … the state determined at some point that she was … not able to care for her.
In September 2015, when Jade was 13, the Iowa Department of Human Services stepped in and Deputy Justin Wallace says LaDawn lost custody.
Deputy U.S. Marshal Justin Wallace: That’s when they took Jade into foster care.
For the next nine months, Jade was in and out of different facilities and foster care. And she often ran away.
Deputy U.S. Marshal Justin Wallace: … run away, been found, run away, been found several times.
Det. Cheryl Nablo: Jade is … doing what some other kids do. She’s running away from the system. She’s not wanting to be placed in a stranger’s home.
When Jade was placed in foster care, LaDawn would have limited access to her. And she wanted more.
Deputy U.S. Marshal Justin Wallace: She wanted Jade to live with her.
But without justo custody, Jamee Koopman says LaDawn resorted to trying to hide her daughter from authorities.
Jamee Koopman: I think she was just trying to hide out to stay with her mom or to stay where her mom could visit.
Det. Cheryl Nablo: Her mom tried to … keep her out of the police spotlight, just trying to hide her out different places.
And according to her aunt, Tandra Brus, Jade became good at hiding.
Tandra Brus: She would change her hair, she would change … her appearance …
Natalie Morales: So she really knew how to run away and hide.
Tandra Brus: She did. She really did.
At that point Jade was caught in the middle of a mother trying to do her best, who arranged stays with friends and family, and being placed in foster care, but often living as a runaway.
Tandra Brus: I felt so bad. … I felt horrible.
Natalie Morales: Did you tell her, you can come here anytime?
Tandra Brus: I did.
Natalie Morales: Call me. Whatever you need.
Tandra Brus: I did. … call me and I’ll be here for you.
Jamee Koopman: She was jumping all over for a while … so it was hard to track her.
The Iowa Department of Human Services lost track of Jade after she ran away from that shelter in June 2016.
Tandra Brus: I had hope that she was out there somewhere and she would get a hold of somebody eventually.
Jamee Koopman: And then … there was nothing.
Investigators learned Jade’s family and friends spent years searching for her online.
Det. Chris Wuebker: We saw in … social media accounts that … friends and family … were trying to reach out to her and continued to look for her.
Det. Cheryl Nablo: Everybody’s reaching out to her at her birthday saying, we love you. We miss you. … We just want you back home.
Jamee Koopman: Every year, I’d go on Facebook, “Happy birthday, Jade, please call me.”
Jamee Koopman: We still love her. You know, anytime she wants to come home … it doesn’t matter what kind of trouble you got yourself into … I thought she’d pop back up.
Jamee Koopman: We just wanted her to know like we were there for her.
According to Wallace, Jade’s mother LaDawn also posted.
Deputy U.S. Marshal Justin Wallace: She misses her and wants her to come back.
Posts like this one from September 2018:
“It’s hurting all of us so much…” “Please call someone Jade … I’m seriously physically dying of a broken heart.”
Deputy U.S. Marshal Justin Wallace: There was no response to any of those.
And when Jade’s mother died a year later, there was still no response.
Det. Chris Wuebker: LaDawn passed away. She never came to the funeral. … She never showed up at the funeral. She would’ve been there.
Jade’s family and friends still held hope Jade would surface when she turned 18 — and would be free of foster care.
Jamee Koopman: I had hoped that she had run away and was laying low and we thought when she turned 18, when it was safe, she would get ahold of us again. And when her 18th birthday came around and she didn’t get ahold of us, we knew … we knew something was very wrong.
As Nablo and Wallace worked to find Jade, they got help from state and national organizations that shared missing posters on social media.
Det. Cheryl Nablo: That was huge. … that’s when a lot of tips started coming in.
And there would be a potential break in the investigation — a tip from a hospital worker in Minnesota.
Det. Cheryl Nablo: We’re not too far away from Iowa. There’s this girl …. we think maybe that’s Jade.
Following Jade Colvin’s digital trail
Det. Cheryl Nablo: We wanted to chase every single lead, every single tip as far as we could.
And when Des Moines PD Detective Cheryl Nablo got a tip Jade Colvin might have been in a hospital in Red Wing, Minnesota, she was hopeful.
Det. Cheryl Nablo: A staff member had observed a female come into the hospital and … the person that she was with was kind of controlling the conversation … it drew suspicion … and they thought it maybe looked like Jade. So there was follow-up done to … get the video footage, to try to figure out who that person was. … when you have a lead, you work your lead until you either prove it’s Jade or prove it’s false. … And ultimately, I