Forgotten Lives, Unsolved Crimes

Right now, I have 89 cases on my desk—men and women who struggled with addiction, turned to survival sex work, and then either vanished or were brutally murdered. Their stories are not whispered about at church socials. They don’t dominate cable news cycles. Their names rarely trend. Instead, they sit in dusty case files, their humanity overshadowed by stigma, their justice delayed or denied.

This isn’t new. For decades, people battling addiction or living on the margins have been treated as if their lives matter less. When they go missing, it’s too often assumed they “just took off.” When their bodies are found, their deaths are explained away as “the lifestyle.” When investigations stall, there’s little outrage. And when cases grow cold, silence swallows them whole.

But silence is dangerous.

Addiction is not a moral failing—it is a disease, one that rewires the brain and traps people in cycles they never asked for. And yet, society is quick to assign blame. That blame becomes a barrier to empathy. It keeps us from seeing the person beneath the struggle: the mother who loves her children, the daughter who once played soccer on weekends, the son who laughed at corny jokes, the friend who dreamed of a better life.

Addiction creates vulnerabilities. And for many, survival sex work becomes a desperate way to meet basic needs—food, shelter, safety. It’s called survival sex work for a reason. These are people fighting to stay alive in a world that has already pushed them to the edges.

Every single one of these 89 cases represents a life cut short or derailed, a family left searching for answers, a community that should have done better. These cases are not “less worthy” because the victims carried the heavy labels of “addict” or “sex worker.” They are not “less urgent” because they did not fit the media’s preferred profile of innocence.

Justice cannot be selective. Compassion cannot be conditional.

If we, as a society, choose not to care about these men and women, then we are complicit in their erasure. Their killers walk free because apathy gave them cover. Their families live in torment because shame and silence made their loved ones invisible.

I am heartbroken as I write this—not only for the 89 cases in front of me, but for the countless others that never made it to my desk. These men and women deserve more than a brief headline or a forgotten police report. They deserve to be remembered, investigated, and fought for with the same energy given to any other victim.

We must demand accountability from law enforcement. We must dismantle the stigma that tells us some lives are disposable. And we must say their names out loud, over and over again, until justice finally listens.

Because behind every case file is a human being. And behind every human being is a story worth telling.

In the coming weeks, I will be sharing the stories of these 89 cases—one by one—so that their voices are not lost in silence. I ask you to walk with me on this journey.

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👉 Speak up, even when society tells you not to care.

Justice begins with awareness. Awareness begins with us.