DEC 5, 2022
A decades-old missing person case in Connecticut is prompting proposed federal legislation. Billy Smolinski disappeared from Waterbury nearly two decades ago, when he was 31 years old. His family still does not have answers about exactly what happened, but they say they encountered systemic...
www.nbcconnecticut.com
A decades-old missing person case in Connecticut is prompting proposed federal legislation.
Billy Smolinski disappeared from Waterbury nearly two decades ago, when he was 31 years old. His family still does not have answers about exactly what happened, but they say they encountered systemic challenges while working with law enforcement to search for their missing son.
Now,
Help Find the Missing Act, or “Billy’s Law,” aims to close loopholes in America’s missing persons system.
[...]
Murphy first introduced Billy’s Law in 2009. It failed in Congress, but now he is re-introducing the bipartisan act.
“The fact that we don't have a centralized database of unidentified remains is really unfortunate,” Murphy said. “Your loved one could be sitting in a morgue, on the other side of the country, and you just don’t know.”
Each year, 600,000 people go missing in the U.S. At the same time, there are 4,400 sets of unidentified human remains recovered, according to the FBI’s
National Crime Information Center (NCIC).
If passed, Billy’s law wound fund a database called
NamUs, which stands for National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.
Billy Smolinski has a page on that site.
[...]
Billy’s Law would additionally connect NamUs to the FBI NCIC so that those two systems could communicate and information would be consolidated.
[...]
