On July 27, 1981, my wife called me from a mall and screamed a sentence that erased the person I used to be:
“John… Adam is gone.”

We weren’t at a concert, or a dark alley, or some dangerous neighborhood. It was a Sears department store, in a bright toy aisle, on a normal afternoon in Hollywood, Florida. My 6-year-old son was supposed to be watching older kids play a video game while his mom looked for a lamp just a few aisles away. Ten minutes. That was the plan.

Adam was small for his age, with light hair and a shy way of standing half a step behind you, like he was never quite sure he belonged in the loudness of the world. He loved watching other kids play more than he loved taking a turn himself. That’s what he was doing when my wife, Reve, left him there: just watching. Safe. Or so we thought.

When she came back, the game was still there. The kids were gone. And so was our son.

At first she thought he was hiding. You know how kids are. She called his name softly, then louder. Checked the next aisle. Then the next. Within minutes she was running from department to department, her heart pounding so loud she could barely hear the store announcements calling for a “lost boy named Adam” to come back to the toy section.

People glanced around, then went back to their shopping carts.

By the time I reached the mall, the scene looked like something from a movie I never wanted to be in. Police officers were moving quickly through the aisles. Shoppers were whispering. And in the middle of the toy section, surrounded by Star Wars boxes and Rubik’s Cubes, my wife was standing there with tears running down her face, staring at the empty space where our son had been.

I still remember the look she gave me when our eyes met. It wasn’t just fear. It was a silent question: “How could he disappear in front of everyone, and no one see anything?”

We searched that store until they closed it. Bathrooms, stockrooms, dressing rooms, behind counters, loading docks. Nothing. No crying child, no little shoes sticking out from under a rack, no stranger anyone remembered. Just a blank space in the story where our son should have been.

For two weeks we lived in a kind of hell I don’t know how to describe. Every phone call made us jump. Every car that slowed down near our house made us look out the window. Volunteers handed out flyers with Adam’s picture. Tips came in, most of them going nowhere. We swung between hope and dread so fast we stopped trusting our own thoughts.

Then, on August 10, the call came.

They had found remains of a small child in a canal more than 100 miles away. They needed us to come in. The drive there was silent. There are no words for the moment you walk into a building with a tiny thread of hope and walk out knowing that your child is never coming home.

People think the worst part is that moment. It’s not. The worst part is everything after, when you have to keep breathing.

Years passed. There were suspects, confessions, retracted confessions. One man, Otis Toole, admitted over and over that he had taken Adam… then changed his story, then changed it again. No physical evidence. No trial. No guilty verdict. Just boxes of files and a knot in my chest that never really went away.

We could have stayed in that darkness. Some days I wanted to. Instead, we made a decision: if we couldn’t save our son, we were going to fight like hell to save other people’s kids. That’s how the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children was born. That’s how I ended up on TV, asking millions of strangers to help bring other children home, even when I could never bring my own.

In 2008—twenty-seven years after Adam vanished—Hollywood Police called another press conference. They said that, based on everything they had, they were closing the case. They officially named Otis Toole as the man responsible for taking and killing my son.

No courtroom. No jury. No handcuffs. Just a sentence spoken into a mic: “We believe he did it.”

People asked me if I felt “closure.” I don’t know if a parent ever really gets that. But I did feel something shift. It wasn’t peace exactly. It was more like finally having a name to pin to the storm that tore your house apart, even if you can’t make it stand trial.

I’m sharing this not to scare you, but to remind you of something I learned the hardest way possible: “safe places” are not always safe, time is brutal, and ten minutes can change every single thing about your life.

If you were me, would that announcement in 2008 be enough for you? Would you be able to accept it and move on, or would you still lie awake at night replaying those ten minutes in a toy aisle?

Tell me honestly what you think in the comments… and if your child is in the next room, go hug them a little tighter tonight. 💔