Flint, Mich. – Sixteen-year- old Hakeem Johnson has five brothers and sisters but hasn’t seen any of them in years.
One lives on his own in Detroit, about 60 miles south of here. One lives with her grandfather; one with Hakeem’s mother, Lynette Thompson, in a homeless shelter. One is in protective custody in Colorado.
And one, 6-year-old Aarone Thompson, is missing and, Aurora police believe, dead.
Hakeem hasn’t seen Aarone since she was a baby. Lynette Thompson hasn’t seen her in four years. Nor has the girl’s maternal grandmother, Mildred Johnson, with whom Hakeem lives in Flint. “Our family has been scattered out for years,” he said.
Aarone’s father, Aaron Thompson, reported his daughter missing last week. Police believe she may have been dead for as long as a year and a half, and they say Aaron Thompson is a “person of interest” in the case.
Of all the questions raised by Aarone’s disappearance, perhaps the most troubling is how could an entire family seem to just lose track of a little girl? How could things get so bad?
But to understand where this family finds itself now, it helps to understand where it came from.
Flint is perhaps the most depressed city in the country. “Resigned to permanent decline” is how one sociology professor and native son put it. It is where Aarone’s parents were born.
More than a quarter of the families here live in poverty. Unemployment is twice the national average. One publication just named it the fourth most dangerous city in the nation. And since the early 1980s, as the automobile industry that built Flint’s vast middle-class neighborhoods staggered and fell, the city, now with about 120,000 residents, has lost 65,000 jobs.
“People graduate here and find no work,” said Helen Bullock, 63. She has lived in Flint since 1960. “The town is just dying. People who stayed here all their lives will have to leave to make a life for themselves.”
In many parts of Flint, it isn’t shocking to not know your siblings or talk with your family.
It is so common for children in Flint to live with people they consider family but who are not related that juvenile case workers here use the term “fictive kin” to describe the relationship.
“You see that so much, where you see kids who have lived for so long with family friends that they think they’re related,” said Patrice Stiehl, casework supervisor for the Genesee County Juvenile Probation Office.
And so every once in a while, Hakeem Johnson, a slightly chubby kid who likes to draw in his free time, makes an effort to keep his family from falling completely apart. He tries to call his siblings, just to make sure he knows where they are.
“I just want my sister back,” he said of Aarone. “I probably won’t get to see her, but at least I’ll know she is OK. I don’t get to see none of my brothers and sisters, but at least I know where they’re at and that they’re OK.”
Mildred Johnson came to Flint in 1962. She did odd jobs in health and home care and married a man who worked in the Chevrolet factory. Together, they bought a beige two-story home on Martin Luther King Avenue in 1971, in a neighborhood of hundreds of large two- and three-story homes. It was the perfect place to raise a family, and she did, giving birth to six kids and raising them all in the house on Martin Luther King, from which she recently moved.
She also hosted foster children and took in Lynette Thompson when she was 17, twice a mother and pregnant again. She later adopted Lynette.
Stiehl, who also grew up near Flint, remembers that downtown Flint was lined with restaurants and department stores, the kind of places that little girls put on patent leather shoes to go to.
“These were Beaver Cleaver type people,” she said.
In the past 15 years, however, the population in Flint has dropped by more than 20,000.
Quantica Hudson-Bell, 21, understands why the family wanted to move away. The mother of two small children, she is trying to decide where to go to raise her family. “It’s hard to get a decent-paying job around here, and our crime rate has gotten worse,” she said.
Most of the stores downtown packed up and left too. Today, homeless men smoke crack near the historic downtown.
City leaders have pledged to improve the situation and bring in more jobs. But this week, General Motors announced it was closing yet another plant in Flint, at the net cost of about 1,000 jobs to the city. More factory closings – or job cuts to the workers there – could be on the way.
Steven Dandaneau, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Dayton and a Flint native, said the hard times haven’t hit the city evenly. While some parts of Flint are still viable, even prosperous, other parts are mired in despair.
“There are whole neighborhoods that have huge rates of poverty,” he said.
In Johnson’s neighborhood, in the northern part of the city, many of those once-middle- class homes have fallen into disrepair. Numerous houses and storefronts are abandoned.
Johnson said crime and drugs are a problem in the neighborhood. One morning, Johnson said, she looked out her window and saw a young man lying dead across the street with a bullet wound to his head.
The lack of jobs in town is seen as a source of much of the lawlessness that occurs.
Social service workers, probation officers and other community members said the cycle of poverty keeps families down.
Lynette Thompson was in foster care as a child and attended a school for delinquent girls. When she became a mother, she stayed with Johnson. Eventually she went to work at the Vlasic Pickle factory, where she met Aaron Thompson. They married and settled down.
Things began to get tense when Aaron and his stepson, Kenyetta, then 14, physically fought. Lynette decided to leave for Denver, but she quickly returned and reconciled. Kenyetta, now 19, downplays the scuffle and says he understands his stepfather was overwhelmed.
“He is not a bad person,” he said. “We fought because he was stressed out with bills piling up.”
Though Lynette and Aaron reconciled, she stayed in Detroit while he moved to Denver with the children, three of hers and two of theirs. She was supposed to join them, but Aaron started a relationship with Shelley Lowe,and Lynette stayed in Detroit.
She soon became homeless, crashing with friends and family before ending up in a shelter.
Nearly a year later, Aaron sent Lynette’s three oldest children by bus back to Michigan but kept his two biological children, Aaron Jr. and Aarone in Denver.
The children were unsettled when they returned. They lived with friends and family in Flint while Lynette was in a shelter. And in 2002, Kenyetta, then 15, stabbed another student at Northridge Academy. Another daughter, Meonte, then 14, also was involved in the altercation.
It is entirely unremarkable in Flint to find a family as shattered and scattered as Aarone Thompson’s, Stiehl said.
“If this little girl wasn’t missing, nobody would have known any of this about this family, nobody would know anything about all this chaos,” Stiehl said. “And there are thousands of families like this.”
