D'wan Sims and Azaria Chamberlain -- When the Mother is Not Believed
Author: Shane Lambert
Original Time of Writing: January 1st, 2021
All articles are subject to editing after the original posting.
Original Time of Writing: January 1st, 2021
All articles are subject to editing after the original posting.
Last-seen date: December 11th, 1994
Last-seen location: Livonia, Michigan at Wonderland Mall -- disputed
NamUs # and Link: #MP6656
Ethnicity/Race: Black
Ethnicity/Race: Black
Sex: Male
Age at time of disappearance: 4 years old
Hair: black
Eye color: brown
Height and weight at the time of disappearance: 3'0" and 50 pounds
Age at time of disappearance: 4 years old
Hair: black
Eye color: brown
Height and weight at the time of disappearance: 3'0" and 50 pounds
This is one of the most unique missing person's cases I've come across. What's known for sure is that D'Wan Sims is missing as of December 11th, 1994.
Coming up with a plausible explanation for what happened to Sims is difficult in this case. However, I decided to assume that the mother was honest in her rendition of events -- so long as honesty doesn't mean accurate. People can tell the truth as far as they know but it's only that they aren't perfect in ascertaining what exactly has happened around them. When that happens, a lot of confusion can result.
My basis for believing the mother in the case of D'Wan Sims is that she was the subject of police scrutiny for a long time before she died and they never arrested her nor charged her with anything that I could find. The mother, Dwanna Harris, claimed that her son went missing from Wonderland Mall. However, neither video footage inside the mall nor witness testimony can actually place the child in the mall in this strange case.
Accordingly, the focus, in this case, has been partly on Dwanna Harris. Now deceased, her claim that she last saw her son in Wonderland Mall has not been accepted by all.
That does remind me of another famous missing person's case, where the mother's claim was not believed when she recounted to investigators what happened to her child. Australia's Azaria Chamberlain case may be food for thought when it comes to similar cases. This was a case where the mother's account of her missing child was not deemed credible.
The case was very different in terms of setting and events. Wonderland Mall in Michigan was not the Australian outback. Furthermore, the Australian case is resolved whereas the Sims case, at the original time of writing, was not.
Starting with the Aussie case, Azaria Chamberlain, according to the mother, was taken away by a dingo, a small carnivore of the Australian outback that might be 40 pounds for a large male. Due to its diminutive size, it doesn't generally pose as a mortal threat to humans.
The mother's claim that her child was taken by a dingo, for bizarre reasons, was considered to be incredulous by some. These people that considered it incredulous had enough clout and ability to obscure the facts to cause a false conviction. As events unfolded, suspicion grew towards the mother, her rendition of events was discounted, and she ended up being convicted of murdering her own child.
After spending a few years in prison, she was released after a nature enthusiast died in the same area that two-month-old Azaria Chamberlain went missing from. When his remains, the nature enthusiast's, were searched for the search included looking in the lairs of dingo's. It was during these efforts that they found the missing child's jacket in a dingo's lair and that was considered proof that the mother's claim was correct all along.
Mon, Feb 10, 1986 – Page 4 · The Sydney Morning Herald (Sydney, New South Wales, Australia) · Newspapers.com
The connection between the Sims case and the Chamberlain case is that they both feature a mother who was not believed when she recounted the events that surrounded her child's disappearance. In the Chamberlain case, disbelief was certainly due to inept professionals in the Australian legal apparatus.
Yet, there were also professionals that believed Chamberlain's mother all along, including a coroner. The coroner in Australia, Mr. Barritt in the snip below, agreed that the child had been taken away by a dingo. The snipped section of an article below contains a reference to limitations on what he could say because he was part of the judicial system.
It would be interesting to know whether D'Wan Sims' mother has allies in the American judicial system whose point of view may have been filtered out somehow. If you don't think that this filtering can happen, the definitive answer to that is that it's what happened in the Chamberlain case. It's true that America and Australia are different countries but everyone involved is equally human.
Dwanna Harris's account of the disappearance of her child is that the child went missing from a mall. If the mother's account is to be taken as honest, then the assumption has to reconcile the fact that she claimed her child went missing from the mall yet no video footage exists that places the child inside of the mall. There's also a lack of witnesses making claims that support her rendition of events.
One explanation would be that the child walked in video-blind spots and that witnesses aren't too important because a woman walking with a child in a mall just isn't memorable. The latter point, regarding the witnesses, isn't difficult to accept: it's known that witnesses error or don't remember the banal.
However, the lack of video footage is tougher to accept. A child walking in blind spots both before and after a mall abduction doesn't seem too plausible.
Yet, what we can start with, if we accept the mother's rendition of events, is one firm premise: she wasn't paying close attention to her child. She's that parent -- the one that goes to a public place with her kid and then doesn't pay attention to him. The best explanation, if we accept the mother's rendition, is that she was being honest about what happened but simply errored in her interpretation of events.
This scenario could see abduction occurring, for example, in the parking lot. Then Harris, the mother, walking into the mall believing that her son D'Wan Sims was nearby the whole time. Perhaps she believed she saw the child with the corner of her eye but really saw things that were not the child.
Along these lines, the toughest part to accept is the entry into the mall. She entered a Target store. This store had an entrance from the parking lot and the store also had an exit into the mall corridors.
The following Youtube video contains footage of the mall where the child is said to be missing from. I don't recommend the entire video but appreciate the footage of the possible abduction scene. Watch from the 30-second mark of the video until about the 53-second mark of the video.
For the entrance to Target (a still is just above), I picture heavy doors that are designed to close automatically when opened unless someone keeps them open -- the kind of doors that four-year-olds might not be able to handle themselves. Thus, upon entry into the mall, you would think the mother would have held the door for her child and noticed him at this point -- almost certainly.
Therefore, I think the doorway footage if it exists, is the critical footage in this case. It's pervasiveness, clarity, and blindspots are of the utmost importance.
Related to that matter, the police have maintained that the child cannot be placed in the mall. Yet, that simply doesn't mean that the child was not there. I question the logical-reasoning abilities of anyone who thinks that a lack of evidence of something happening conclusively means it did not happen. Things happen that are outside of the scope of tracing all the time -- including what happened to Azaria Chamberlain, at least for long enough for a wrongful conviction to develop.
In the news I've read from the journalism near the time of Sims' disappearance, a lot of the comments were like this: "We find no evidence that D'Wan Sims was at Wonderland Mall nor has anyone come forward to place D'Wan at the mall. The evidence leads us to believe that D'Wan Sims was not at Wonderland Mall" (Pete Kunst qtd. in December 21st, 1994's The Herald-Palladium).
The phrase "leads up to believe" does not reflect confidence. What's needed is this: "The evidence shows that Harris walked into the mall alone." I think the police would say that if they could but that they won't say anything irresponsible and so their passive statements result, statements that therefore hint at insufficient mall footage.
This is important enough to repeat: there is fallacious reasoning on the part of one who takes Kunst's comments or similar ones on this case to mean D'Wan wasn't at the mall. I think it is this mistake that people have run amok with. However, I believe that anyone working on this case should presume that the mother was honest. At the time of the child's disappearance, she had divided attention.
It all makes me think that Harris's entry into the mall wasn't clear in the footage. After this entrance, the mother was flustered enough to lose focus on where her child was. Then, D'Wan simply disappeared into the arms of the type of guy that lurks in malls looking for a chance to abduct. My best guess is that an abduction took place in the parking lot or in the Target store and I'm more partial to the latter than the former.
Comments
Post a Comment