After 32 years a family of a missing mother finally has answers.
It was May of 1990 when Myrtle Brown disappeared. The single mother was in Brooklyn visiting a friend when her purse was snatched. The handbag held her medication, the 35-year-old woman suffered from epilepsy. Later the same day Myrtle told her friend she wasn’t feeling well and headed to the hospital for a refill of her medication. No one saw the woman again.
“She ended up going by herself,” said Eboney Brown, Myrtle’s daughter who was 13 years old at the time of her mother’s disappearance. “And then that was the last moment, you know, we ever heard from her.”
Weeks passed but no answers were given to the grieving family who visited police stations and hospitals as often as they could.
“I never thought she passed away,” Eboney continued in her interview with NBC News. “I thought maybe she just wanted something different, maybe, out of life. I didn’t know, to be honest, I was just confused and sad.”
In April of this year Robert Brown, Myrtle’s brother was watching “NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt.” It was then he saw a profile of the cold case squad at the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner. The team being interviewed by Holt and led by Dr. Angela Soler manages nearly 1,250 unidentified person cases, most of them tracing back decades.
One of the cases reviewed in the show had a facial reconstruction that Robert recognized.
“I saw a young lady that could be or could not have been my sister,” he said. “And I said to myself, ‘Wow, I wonder if that could be her.’”
A few days later Robert and his family called the medical examiner and Dr. Soler began working on Myrtle’s case almost immediately.
It was discovered that Myrtle had gone to the King’s County Hospital in Brooklyn but had never registered which is why the family found no record of her visit when they searched the local hospitals. It turned out that while in the waiting room Myrtle had a seizure and passed away.
Myrtle had given people at the hospital her basic information but not enough for them to find the next of kin. Dr. Soler proved that the facial reconstruction that Robert had seen was not his sister but due to the information given by the family and pictures that Dr. Soler was able to use to match records Myrtle was found and her family finally was given peace after so long.
“Even though it didn’t end up being the individual the recreation was based on, it helped us resolve a case,” Dr. Soler said in an interview. “It made a difference. And that’s the whole point is … to get people to stop and think for a moment and follow through and give us a phone call.”
