Jen Rivera was used to chasing open cases. For years, the southwest suburban mother of four has poured herself into true crime investigative podcasting, working directly with families to shed new light on their stories in the hopes that renewed attention would yield closure.
But when Rivera’s aunt Linda Brown went missing last month, she couldn’t wrap her head around her family having a case of their own.
“I realized — OK, this is my family member,” Rivera recalled. “This is our Linda.”
Now, with her work turned personal, Rivera is taking her advocacy a step further as she sets her sights on launching a new program to ensure other families faced with missing person cases have the best chance at bringing their loved ones — their Linda — home.
“How can we take (our) experience,” Rivera said in a recent interview, “and help other families?”
Brown was reported missing on Jan. 3, but just over a week later, her body was pulled from Lake Michigan. The Cook County medical examiner’s office ruled that Brown drowned in a suicide. She was 53.
From news reports to posts on social media, word spread quickly that Brown, a special education teacher at Robert Healy Elementary School on Chicago’s South Side, had gone missing. Police, in their initial missing person report for Brown, said she was last seen in the Bronzeville neighborhood, near where she lived with her husband. Days later, police updated the alert saying she was seen about half a mile away from where her body was ultimately recovered.
Authorities at the time said Brown may have required immediate medical attention.
Every year, Chicago police receive thousands of missing person reports. Last year, police logged just over 8,300 reports, according to police data. Of those, people were located within 72 hours in 1,580 — or about 19% — of cases, data shows, though police note that number is very likely higher, as not every missing person report may have been updated right when someone was found.
A police spokesperson in a statement said the department “takes every missing person case seriously and investigates everyone consistently,” with the hope of reuniting loved ones.
“Locating missing persons is an effort that CPD Detectives prioritize,” the statement said.
Still, when it comes to bringing attention to a case, it’s often up to families and friends to be their loved ones’ champions, whether that’s through posting flyers or launching a foot search.
“(But) there’s no rule book,” Wendy Davis, who’s been searching for her missing father in the south suburbs for the past two months, told the Tribune. “We were thrown straight into it. We were like, ‘Oh god, what do we even do?’”
That’s a question Rivera is hoping her new program can answer, by using lessons learned in her family’s own search and insight she’s gained from years spent working as an advocate.
‘I know what to do’
A native of Chicago’s South Side, Rivera started delving into advocacy more than a decade ago after a sexual assault she survived when she was a teenager drove her to start mentoring women in her mid-20s. The work introduced her to podcasting, initially to share women’s stories like her own, but Rivera found herself going further and further into the true crime space.
Around five years ago, she and a friend started a true crime podcast looking at unsolved missing person and murder cases with the intent of finding affected families and partnering with them on episodes, an approach Rivera calls “ethical true crime podcasting.” She’s since grown the venture into a full-blown nonprofit, dubbed the Reignited Project.
“(It’s) not for entertainment purposes,” Rivera said, sitting down with the Tribune at her home podcast studio in Plainfield. “But genuinely (for) … spreading awareness, so hopefully they can get answers.”
Rivera says she’s worked with several families navigating missing person cases. Most are still searching.
It’s that background that had Rivera devising a plan as soon as Brown went missing. When the surreal understanding that her aunt had disappeared set in, a switch in her head flipped — bringing her out of her shock — and Rivera said to herself: “I know what to do.”
Her family started by calling area health facilities. Before she vanished, Brown had been grappling with her mental health. It’s something Brown managed throughout her life, but her struggles, according to Rivera, had been mounting leading up to her disappearance, giving way to near-daily panic attacks and prompting Brown to take a medical leave from teaching. Still, Brown had sought help and was receiving treatment.
Rivera, who is Brown’s niece through marriage, recalled the first time she met Brown. It was about 20 years ago, back when she and her husband first started dating, and the introduction came through a laugh — a loud, obnoxiously silly laugh that Rivera said she heard before she knew it was Brown’s. Over the years, they grew close, frequently working on puzzles together and going on summer cabin trips to Michigan with her husband’s side of the family. Rivera never knew Brown to disappear.
“I took it seriously right away,” Rivera said. With no news from the health facilities, they alerted police, then took action. Rivera and her husband heard that Brown was missing early in the morning on Jan. 4. A day later, there were news reports about her disappearance.
For the next week, they put out calls for help on social media, circulated flyers, made public pleas in media interviews and retraced Brown’s last known steps.
“I (knew) that we (needed) to keep moving forward,” Rivera said.
She’s held onto the sentiment since Brown was found dead on Jan. 12. While it’s been difficult in a way Rivera doesn’t know how to describe, she knew she couldn’t sit idly in her grief. So she started thinking about the next family, and how she could help. That’s been the key, she says, to “not falling apart completely.”
The protocol
The Linda Brown Advocacy Protocol has four pillars: preparedness; early-stage family guidance; ethical advocacy, media and search education; and collaboration and systems-level growth.
The idea is to provide a step-by-step framework families can follow if a loved one goes missing. For instance, guidance implores that families put together a “digital preparedness folder,” composed of recent photos, medical information and emergency contacts. Other steps include what to do — and what not to do — in the first 24 to 72 hours, how to navigate and speak with the media and how to safely organize community searches.
Sam Farley, whose daughter went missing from their Far South Side home in 2024, said he could see a guide for families being “invaluable.” Farley, noting that his daughter was found after a monthslong disappearance, said he had to rely on friends and neighbors who knew to put up flyers and get the word out via social media to bring her home. Without them, he said, he would have been at a loss.
And without the attention they brought to his daughter’s case, he ventures his daughter “would have just been a little Black girl lost up in the system,” a situation that’s all too familiar for families of Black and brown women and girls in the city. Over the past two decades, Black people have accounted for about two-thirds of missing person cases in Chicago, a 2023 Pulitzer Prize-winning report from the Indivisible Institute and City Bureau found.
Farley said exposure, and knowing how to get it, is essential. He said he could also imagine guidance grounding loved ones as they wade through their grief.
“It’s kind of like when … somebody close to you dies, but yet you still gotta prepare for a funeral,” he said.
With her protocol, Rivera hopes to “bridge the gap” between families, advocates, media and law enforcement. Though the program is still in development, she’s aiming to launch, at least in part, over the next three to six months.
Alongside the missing persons framework, Rivera plans to eventually expand the program to include mental health awareness and crisis intervention. She also means to create an initiative for helping teachers reintegrate back into the classroom after they’ve been away on medical leave. That change had been stirring a lot of stress and anxiety in her aunt, Rivera said, exacerbating what she was already struggling with. Rivera wants to ease the transition.
Initially, though, the missing persons framework will be the first to roll out.
“It’s gonna be amazing … for people in the future that have to go through this,” said Wendy Davis, the south suburban woman searching for her missing dad. When she started looking for her father, Daniel Davis, after he disappeared in late November, it was a “mad, mad goose chase.”
She said she wishes she had had something like the Linda Brown Advocacy Protocol to follow back then. In the months since, Wendy Davis has amassed a vast network of resources through her search, from a social media following offering words of advice from other states and even other countries to accruing cellphone data and working with rescue teams. She wants to see other families have that same support.
“It seems like a rare scenario for you to go through, having a missing loved one, but countless people go through it,” she said.
When her dad is found, Wendy Davis said she’s inspired to do something — to find a way to help — like Brown’s family.
“The less time you spend just running around chasing ghosts,” she said, “the better.”
