The Detroit FBI is joining the search for two missing Black teen girls who vanished from their adoptive parents’ home in June.
According to the Roscommon County Sheriff’s Office, Iris Perez, who is 14 years old and Tamara Perez, who is 15 years old, were last seen June 28 heading towards woods near their home in Houghton Lake, Michigan, about 190 miles northwest of Detroit. Days after the young girls disappeared, surveillance video obtained by the FBI shows a white Jeep leaving the area at the time Iris and Tamara disappeared.
The sisters moved from Florida to Michigan with their adoptive parents in March 2023 after Florida terminated the parental rights of their biological mother in Port St. Lucie.
The FBI also says that Iris has a star tattoo on the left side of her neck. The teen sisters have connections to multiple locations including Port St. Lucie and Lake Worth, Florida, and Winchester, Tennessee,
The disappearance of Iris and Tamara Perez draws attention to the absurd number of Black women who go missing every year.
According to the National Crime Information Center, despite making up only 15% of the female population, Black women and girls accounted for nearly 34.6% of missing women in 2021.
Black women make up about 7% of the U.S. population but were 36% of missing person cases in 2021.
By the end of the year, 14,323 Black women and girls were still missing and their cases drug on four times longer than average, according to the task force report.
Many experts also believe the official numbers of missing and murdered Black women and girls are likely undercounted.
Rosa Page, registered nurse and head of the Black Femicide Prevention Coalition, told U.S. News, she believes the amount of missing Black women is a lot higher than the numbers suggest.
“There are no flyers, there is no information many times – even (for) the missing women and girls on my page,” she said.
“If Black people go missing at double their occurrence in the actual population, which happens to be the case, there should be double the stories. But in fact, it’s the opposite,” Kyle Pope, the editor-in-chief and publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review, told WTKR. “When you go missing, your case gets more or less coverage, and it correlates directly to race.”
If you have any information on the whereabouts of Iris Perez or Tamara Perez the FBI is asking that you immediately contact the Roscommon County Sheriff’s Office at (989) 275-5101.
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