Around the Twin Cities, photos of missing people are being featured on billboards with the hope that they could shake loose new information and remind the public that their families are still waiting for answers.
The Minnesota Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives Office selected eight cases of long-term missing people to highlight, though they say there is no shortage of cases.
“We want to support families in getting resolutions and answering these questions of where their loved ones are, where they could be,” said Ana Negrete, community planner with the office, which is a division of the Minnesota Department of Public Safety.
The oldest case on a billboard is Leo Coleman Cortez, who was supposed to meet his sister in St. Paul in the 1980s and hasn’t been seen since. The most recent is Nevaeh Kingbird, who was 15 when she disappeared from Bemidji in 2021. Also among the missing people on billboards is April Geyer, who with her friend Roseanna Forcum reportedly attended a party in St. Paul 26 years ago this month; neither has been seen since.
The MMIR Office started in 2022, after research showed that Native American women and girls made up 1 percent of Minnesota’s population, but accounted for 8 percent of all murdered women and girls in the state from 2010 through 2018. The office holds an annual day of remembrance and works with families. The billboard initiative is their largest-scale public awareness campaign so far, Negrete said.
Geyer’s mother, Gloria Hornstad, said she wishes there would have been a billboard for her daughter decades ago, but she hopes the push now will bring answers.
“I would love to bring her home,” Hornstad said. “I am 77 years old now and I would hope and pray that we can get some results before I leave this world.”
Teddi Wind, Kingbird’s mother, said she receives messages from people who tell her they’ve seen a billboard about her daughter. She’d like the billboards to be extended to northern Minnesota.
A billboard was initially posted for Kingbird last year, organized by Missing Children Minnesota. Teresa Lhotka, that organization’s executive director, connected Negrete with Clear Channel Outdoor to set the current project into motion.
“It’s such a valuable tool and it’s so important for the public to be able to contribute what they know, and it’s a good way to make sure that people don’t forget about the missing and their family,” Lhotka said.
Clear Channel Outdoor started providing space on the billboards at no cost last month and the plan is they’ll be up for a year, Negrete said. The digital billboards are in Maplewood, Mounds View, Shoreview, Burnsville, Columbus Township, and two are in Minneapolis. Images on the billboards are on a rotation, so people will see them in various locations.
Two friends missing from St. Paul
In St. Cloud, images on a billboard have recently been featuring Forcum, 15, and Geyer, 21. Alison Feigh, director of the Jacob Wetterling Resource Center, contacted Lamar Advertising, who agreed to donate the electronic billboard space.
Forcum was from St. Cloud and her family last had contact with her Aug. 10, 1998, according to her missing person flyer. Geyer’s mother said her daughter — who she describes as outgoing, friendly and smart — was living with friends in St. Cloud.
“When families have been waiting for answers for 20 years, 30 years, sometimes people ask, ‘Why are they still pushing? Why are they still asking?'” Feigh said. “It doesn’t go away. Someone out there knows something about what happened to these two girls who are very much missed by their families.”
The only good thing about so much time passing is “the relationships that people were trying to protect back when something happened are not the same relationships 20, 30 years down the road” and people may be more willing to talk about what they know, Feigh said.
Forcum’s father, John Daniel, still orders a birthday cake every December for his daughter’s birthday — they say “Rosie” and include her current age, now 41.
“I think there is information out there but people don’t want to talk,” Daniel said. “Because they’re scared.”
The MMIR office is planning on putting up a similar billboard about Geyer and Forcum in Wadena, Negrete said.
In 2000, a confidential informant told St. Paul police that he knew what happened to Forcum and Geyer. The pair had been strangled, he said, inside a St. Paul apartment in 1998.
He told police that he and the killer had taken the bodies to farmland outside Wadena, in west-central Minnesota, and buried them next to a stream, police and the parents of the young women said in 2000.That year, police and the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension searched and excavated the supposed burial ground near Wadena, which is 150 miles northwest of the Twin Cities. Cadaver-sniffing dogs also were brought in, but authorities came up empty-handed.
The inquiry into Geyer and Forcum “is very much an active and ongoing investigation,” said Jill Oliveira, BCA spokeswoman, on Thursday. The BCA is continuing to urge anyone with information to come forward, including anonymously if they choose.
“Even if you don’t know everything, a tidbit of information can be the missing piece that helps us get to the answers we need for these families,” Oliveira said. The BCA tip line can be reached at 877-996-6222.
The missing
MMIR has worked with the families of the eight people featured in the billboards in the Twin Cities, Negrete said. They are:
- Leo Coleman Cortez. He left the Anoka State Hospital in the 1980s and intended to meet his sister at a St. Paul bus depot. She waited for him, and called the hospital and local law enforcement agencies. She looked for her brother alone for decades until she met Negrete. She filed a missing-person report last year with Anoka police.
- Kateri Mishow. She was 22 when she was last seen in Minneapolis on Jan. 5, 2007.
- Nevaeh Kingbird. Her family is planning a candlelight vigil for Aug. 26, her 18th birthday. She’s been missing from Bemidji since she was 15 on Oct. 22, 2021. Her mother remembers her daughter: A good student and an athlete, she was fluent in her native language of Ojibwe. “She was very caring and loving, and tried to see the good in everyone, even if they didn’t deserve it,” Wind said. “That was probably my biggest worry — that people were going to take advantage of that about her.”
- Jeremy Jourdain. He was 17 when he left a relative’s house in Bemidji around midnight on Oct. 31, 2016. Family members followed but weren’t able to find him.
- Melissa Eagleshield. Last seen near Island Lake in Becker County on Oct. 5, 2014, she was 42 at the time.
- April Geyer. Family members in Mille Lacs County reported the 21-year-old missing in August 1998, after she’d attended a party in St. Paul.
- Mato Dow. He was last seen at age 25 when he left his sister’s apartment in Redwood Falls on Oct. 13, 2017.
- Melissa Burt. She hasn’t been seen since getting in an RV in Alexandria on Nov. 7, 2020. She was 52 then.
Anyone with information can contact law enforcement in the area from where people are missing or Crime Stoppers of Minnesota at 800-222-8477.
Clear Channel Outdoor partners with organizations like the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and local groups “who leverage the mass reach and visibility of our digital and printed media displays to help bring missing and endangered people to safety,” said spokesman Jason King from the Austin, Texas-based company.
