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Minnesota West Community and Technical College in Canby. He briefly visited friends in a nearby town before leaving for home—taking back roads rather than the highway. At approximately 1:50 a.m., Brandon called home asking his father and [me] to come help him. He had gone into the ditch and needed help getting his car out. Brandon told us he was near Lynd [Minnesota].”
    The Swansons jumped into their truck and drove to the area where Brandon said he’d landed in the ditch but couldn’t find him. They called Brandon and asked for help locating him. Despite much back and forth, they still couldn’t connect, so Brandon decided to set off on foot and walk toward them. He remained on the phone the entire time—a forty-seven-minute call. Then, says Annette, Brandon said, “Oh, shit.”
    “The call ended abruptly. Several attempts to regain contact with Brandon failed. Brandon has not been seen or heard from since,” she says.
    “We encountered reluctance from law enforcement in accepting a missing persons report, searching, and investigating, but we are a stubborn, strong-minded, and determined family. Their reluctance and inadequacies would not prevent us from searching for our son,” Annette says.
    Like other families facing this type of situation, the Swansons channeled their energies in productive directions: they continued to scour the area for their son, even finding a search manager to coordinate the many wilderness searches they have conducted, and they made sure other families didn’t face the same initial official disinterest as they did. Following a campaign by the Swanson family and their supporters, Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty signed Brandon’s l aw, which requires a faster and more proactive response from law enforcement when adults vanish, to give families a better shot at locating their loved ones and affords specialized training for law enforcement.
    Law enforcement wastes no time when a young child is involved, but adults—even young adults like Brandon—are a different story. An eighteen-year-old is an adult in most states, although three—Alabama, Delaware, and Nebraska—consider nineteen the age of majority, and in Mississippi it is twenty-one. Some states also grant majority to those who have graduated from high school or joined the service.
    Not all police take reports when an older child or young adult disappears under circumstances not considered suspicious. Many departments already operate on paper-thin resources and don’t have the personnel to look for those old enough to leave on their own. Also, few agencies have dedicated missing persons units; in fact, the majority of officers have little or no specialized training in the field. I received none and believe my experience is typical of local police.
    Jesse Ross. Courtesy of Don and Donna Ross.
    Because of this, older teens, including Jesse Ross, are often labeled as runaways, even when their families know better. Like Brandon, Jesse was nineteen and a college student at the time of his disappearance on November 21, 2006. The tall redhead, whom his family characterizes as “never dull,” was attending a Model United Nations conference in Chicago and had called his mother, Donna, the day before to give her an update on the trip. It was the last time they would talk.
    A good student with an internship at a local radio station, Jesse majored in communications and minored in politics at the University of Missouri–
Kansas City. One of more than one thousand students attending the confer ence, Jesse and the other “delegates” were called to a mock emergency meet ing at 2:00 a.m. at the Four Points Sheraton Hotel. Cameras on the premises caught the teen, dressed in a white T-shirt, jeans, and a green warm-up jacket, as he walked toward the hotel’s exterior doors about half an hour later.
    Jesse’s hotel was a ten-minute walk from the Sheraton, where the conference was held. The Ross family says Chicago police claim no foul play