InterviewAfter 35 years of searching, activist still fights indifferent system for Korea's missing

Na Joo-bong has spent 35 years searching for missing people. For him, the recent case of a Jeju police officer who prematurely closed multiple missing persons cases was no surprise.

“Among 262 police stations in Korea, many lack missing persons investigation teams. It’s a department officers avoid, since the work spans missing children and adults, as well as runaways, with a heavy caseload and little to show for the effort,” said Na, 69, chief of the National Organization of Finding Missing Children and Family.

The severity of the problem came to light in August, when the Jeju officer was found to have closed the case of Jang Mi-ran, a 37-year-old woman missing for months, without confirming her whereabouts. Jang’s remains were later found, and the officer admitted to closing multiple such cases to avoid the extra workload involved in keeping them open.

The case has raised public awareness of missing adults, but the current Act on the Protection and Support of Missing Children only covers people who went missing before turning 18, along with people with intellectual disabilities and dementia patients, leaving adults in a legal blind spot.

Pattern of indifference

Na said the situation used to be far worse before the serial murders committed by Yoo Young-chul, who was convicted of killing 20 people between 2003 and 2004, and Kang Ho-sun, who killed 10 from 2005 to 2008.

As those cases shocked the public, authorities began taking cases of missing adults more seriously, and the system for finding them gradually grew more structured, Na said. Kang’s case, in particular, drew Na's attention more deeply to missing adults.

“Families of Kang’s victims reported them missing, but police just noted the reports and dismissed them as runaways without properly searching. So the families made flyers themselves and came to me, asking for help finding their mother or daughter.”

Police indifference isn’t the only obstacle families face. They themselves often aren’t sure whether their loved one is truly missing, making an immediate search harder to launch.

“It isn’t easy for families to hand out flyers for an adult family member, say, in their 30s or 50s. They worry what people will think if the person turns up after just a few days of no contact,” Na said, adding that even when flyers go out, the public shows less interest than it does for missing children.

Na recalled a case from about 20 years ago.

“A homemaker in her 30s said she was going to the market and disappeared. Her husband called relatives asking if anyone had heard from her. He wondered if she’d run off with someone and only later reported it to police. Even a week later, he couldn’t bring himself to post flyers, worried about how others would see it.”

Authorities found the woman's skeletal remains months later and police simply classified her death as a suicide driven by personal despair.

Cases in which families hold off on reporting a missing adult are common, Na said, since adults sometimes turn up on their own after a day or even a week.

“Unless there's a sign like a large sum of money being withdrawn around the time of the disappearance, it’s hard for police to open a task force for a full investigation,” he said.

Expertise gap

A lack of expertise makes investigations even harder, a gap that leads to many years of working on missing person cases, but few officers stay that long.

“In areas like intelligence, security and criminal investigations, officers typically stay for decades, building up expertise over time. But in cases like Jeju’s, officers are on rotational posts lasting just one or two years, with no time to build expertise.”

Fostering a sense of mission among officers and adding personnel are important since police are stretched thin, he explained.

Na’s own search for missing people began in 1991, when he traveled the country performing and selling cassette tapes. In Incheon, he met fathers handing out flyers for their missing sons.

The five boys, all elementary school students, were dubbed the “frog boys” by the media after they went missing in the southeastern city of Daegu earlier that year while out looking for salamander eggs. The case gripped the nation for over a decade until their remains were found on a nearby mountain, though the killer was never identified.

Na got flyers from the fathers and began handing them out to crowds at his shows.

Before parting ways with them, he took more flyers to distribute at markets, train stations and bus terminals while selling cassettes. When the flyers ran out, Na had 20,000 more printed at his own expense. His efforts drew media attention and he devoted himself to the cause full-time.

That commitment was fueled by what he had witnessed firsthand.

“When I met the fathers of the 'frog boys,' I thought about how painful it must be for kids to be separated from their parents. In the 1980s, I ran a street stall near Cheongnyangni Station in Seoul, where kids from the countryside who came to Seoul often ended up sold into prostitution or drugged and forced to peddle pens and newspapers. Seeing that, I figured that was probably what happened to children who went missing at a young age.”

That personal history shaped his policy proposal. Na is calling for the creation of a body under the president’s or prime minister’s office, with dedicated teams for finding children under 18, people with disabilities, dementia patients and missing or runaway adults.

“A team like that, made up of experts from the public, private and police sectors, could resolve most cases early, and related legislation needs to come quickly," he said. "Once the critical 24-hour window closes and a missing adult still hasn’t turned up, police should be able to track their location, even without consent, if necessary.”