02/22/2023
26 years......😔 Jami`s Mom is haunted daily by questions: What happened? Where did she go? How could it have happened?.....
Why, after all this time, are there still no answers?💔
On the morning of Oct. 15, 1997, Connie Maciag’s then 18-year-old daughter, Jami Charlene Furnandiz, woke up in the Port Perry apartment she shared with her 18-month-old son Stefan. She prepared the child for the day and, at around 8:30 a.m., dropped him off at the Stonemoor Day Care centre in town.
And that is the last confirmed sighting of the teen. She did not show up that Wednesday for classes at Port Perry High School. She has remained missing, seemingly without a trace, ever since.
Jami’s disappearance and the continuing mystery surrounding her fate remains a yawning abyss at the core of her mother’s being.
“Some days are good, and some days are bad,” Maciag, 61, said in a recent phone interview from her home in rural eastern Ontario. “It never goes away — never. It just totally changes your whole life.
“Every day,” Maciag said, sighing, “I shed a tear.”
Although Maciag usually phoned Jami each morning as the day began, she broke her routine on the 15th of October. Her first hint that anything was amiss was when she got a call from the daycare centre: Jami hadn’t shown up for pickup time.
Maciag went to Stonemoor and got Stefan.
“I went to her apartment,” she said. “Everything was normal.”
Except — it was not. Maciag had a hunch right away som**hing was very wrong.
“I had a gut feeling,” she said. “Jami wouldn’t have done that. If she couldn’t have picked up Stefan she would have phoned me.”
Maciag called Durham police right away. But she says now police didn’t immediately share her sense of urgency.
“I think they thought she was a runaway,” Maciag said.
But as time passed and Jami remained missing and out of touch, police acted. They issued a press release calling for information. “Police seeking public’s help in locating missing woman," said a headline in the Oct. 21 edition of the Port Perry Star.
“Her family fears for her safety,” the story read. “Police say the Borelia Court resident had been doing well in school and had been acting very responsibly at the time of her disappearance.”
Jami had gone missing one time previously, in 1994, the story noted.
Maciag said that prior to Jami’s disappearance the teen appeared to be getting her life in order. She was dedicated to young Stefan and committed to obtaining her Grade 10 credits. At the same time, however, she was a young woman — just past being a girl, really — with an enormous amount of responsibility.
“She was kind, she was compassionate. She was too trusting,” Maciag said. “She was actually very naive. Things were starting to turn around for her.
“And then she just vanished.”
In the days following Jami’s disappearance a narrative began to form regarding her suspected movements on Oct. 15. Someone claimed to have seen a young woman matching her description hitchhiking on Simcoe Street between Port Perry and Oshawa, where she had friends.
One report indicated she’d spent time at a residence on Colbourne Street in Oshawa, leaving at around 3:30 p.m.
Then, nothing.
Police issued periodic updates, but new information was sparse. Investigators called again on the public to come forward with any information.
Of course, the possibility that Jami had met with foul play was being considered virtually from the beginning. Her tendency to get around by hitchhiking clearly made her vulnerable. In 2001, when Durham police announced they were re-opening the case, Detective Shane Wasmund acknowledged as much.
“I’m not satisfied that a young mother would leave her son at a daycare and not come back,” Wasmund told the Toronto Sun in June of 2001. “Foul play is a possibility.”
Detective Doug Parker, a member of the team assigned to the new investigation, said officers had been re-interviewing sources they’d talked to in 1997. He said they’d been able to confirm Jami’s presence in Oshawa on the afternoon she’d gone missing.
“We now know, almost to a certainty, that Jami made it to Oshawa and was there for some time before she vanished,” Parker told the Port Perry Star.
Parker made another plea to the public to assist in the investigation.
“No information is too small, and we are following all leads on this,” he told a reporter. “Tell people to call us, no matter how insignificant they think it may be.”
On Sept. 11, 2001 — a day when another story would come to dominate the news — a headline in the Toronto Sun offered new hope. “Missing mom sighted: Cops," it read.
The story indicated that a caller to the Child Find hotline claimed to have met Jami in Calgary in late 1997. Police acknowledged that, if true, the tip took the case in a whole new direction.
“If we could just firm up the fact Jami arrived in Calgary in the fall of ’97, that’s huge for us,” Det. Grant Arnold told the paper. “It would eliminate the idea of her being picked up hitchhiking and never making it home because of foul play.”
In the end, the tip led nowhere. It amounted to little more than additional heartache for Jami’s loved ones.
“It gave me a little bit of hope,” Maciag recalled. “But in the end it was just disappointing.”
Jami’s disappearance remains an active file and, as recently as 2011, Durham police received a tip about it.
The tip, from a source in Port Perry, “related to how Jami went missing,” said Det. Erik Mamers, who is in charge of the file now.
Even now, more than two decades later, the information police have been able to confirm is sparse, Mamers said in a recent interview. Little in Jami’s life prior to her disappearance provided cops with insight as to what may have happened to her, he said.
“There is no prior behaviour to indicate any deviation from her normal activities,” Mamers said. “She didn’t live a high-risk lifestyle. This is a girl with limited resources who just disappeared.”
The arrest in late 2017 of Adam Strong, in whose Oshawa apartment police found DNA linked to two missing teens, prompted police to revisit Jami’s file, Mamers noted.
(Strong is now charged with the first-degree murders of 18-year-old Rori Hache, who went missing in the summer of 2017, and Kandis Fitzpatrick, 19, who disappeared in 2008).
“We did look at that,” Mamers said. “There’s not sufficient evidence to draw any links at this point.”
Durham homicide Det. John Taylor noted that it’s not unusual for people to go missing — police process hundreds of missing persons reports every year — but it is extremely rare for someone to disappear without a trace, and go unfound.
“It’s about one a year,” Taylor said. “This just doesn’t happen here.”
These days Jami’s mother, Maciag, carries on, just as she did when her daughter disappeared in 1997. Maciag assumed care of Stefan, as well as her own son, now 31, who has special needs.
Stefan, now 24, still “struggles” with his mother’s disappearance, Maciag said. For her part, Maciag copes with her ongoing grief, but admits to being haunted by how much remains unknown.
“You’re normal on the outside,” she said. “And then, when you’re alone, that’s when your feelings come out. Right now, I’ve got nothing. And when you have nothing your mind makes up all kinds of things.
“I just try to keep myself busy so I don’t have a lot of time to think,” Maciag said.
“I just wish someone would come forward with som**hing.”
Durham police can be reached at 905-579-1520.
Article was written in 2020 - https://www.sachem.ca/news-story/9909912-ontario-cold-case-young-scugog-mom-disappeared-without-a-trace-in-1997/
https://www.doenetwork.org/cases/1982dfon.html
https://www.missingkids.ca/en/missing-children-database/5
