Estimated read time: 4-5 minutes
- Road Warriors for the Missing, a biker group, seeks missing children.
- They collaborate with ex-Fundamentalist LDS Church members, using various methods to locate children.
- The group aims to generate leads and hopes to reunite families.
BRIGHAM CITY — A group of leather-clad bikers have logged thousands of miles on their motorcycles on a mission: To find missing children.
"When we pull up with a bunch of us making a bunch of noise ... it's for a purpose, we want to draw attention," said Matt Anderson.
Members of the Road Warriors for the Missing know they draw attention, and they use it to their advantage when they're out looking for missing children.
"I've been 35,000 miles on cases since May of last year," said Jason Clark, president of Road Warriors for the Missing. He and Anderson are among about 60 bikers who drive to every corner of the state and beyond, looking for missing kids.
"I can't stand the thought of what these kids go through," Clark said. "If you read through the case files of what we see, you'd give up your dang job and come and ride with us and go save the kids."
They said people are willing to open up to them, despite stereotypes.
"A lot of people find it easier to give us information than they do police," Clark said.
Last year, they started working with former members of the Fundamentalist LDS Church, who are separated from their children.
The Road Warriors for the Missing are volunteers who knock on doors and follow leads in the historically secretive community. They don't physically move the children, their focus is, instead, on locating them and alerting the authorities.
"We use private investigators. We use drones. We use the boots-on-the-ground team. We use e-mail-blast teams," Clark said. "Normally, we like to get a case that's less than 90 days old. We were farther behind on that on all of these cases, but I don't think it would have made a difference."
The advocacy group works with parents like Sarah Johnson, who has legal custody of her children but hasn't seen her son Salome Johnson in four years.
"I was granted primary physical custody of the children, and then their father was given visitation rights," Johnson said.
But, on the day Salome's father was ordered to drop him off to her, she was told her son had run away.
"I don't believe Salome ran away," Johnson said. "He had to have been taken away somewhere, hidden away."
Police consider Salome a runaway. Johnson and other ex-FLDS parents the Road Warriors work with say it's not that simple.
"He had to have had some help to disappear to that extent, and I know that because of the religious conditioning that we all grew up in — in the FLDS — that he had been or led to believe during that six months where I didn't have him, he had been taught that I was a bad person," Johnson said. She's hopeful the biker group can lead her back to him.
"We'll work in a circular pattern out from there, hanging fliers, knocking on doors, trying to get any information, any noise happening that we can about the child, anybody that might have seen it," Anderson said.
The Road Warriors for the Missing travel across the state for their jobs, but a lot of their work is done in southern Utah. It's become more complex recently, with the FLDS moving out of the area and across the country.
"They could be up by Kanaraville, Cedar City, Enoch," said Josh Lancaster, a private investigator with the group. "I've even heard stories of them buying property in Wyoming, the Dakotas. Of course, they have their place down in Texas."
He has relationships with people in the FLDS Church community in Hilldale, which is the backdrop of Johnson's former life. The giant houses remain, but many of the polygamist families have moved out.
"We've had stories of people seeing somebody at a house, somebody goes by the next day, the house is empty," Lancaster said. "The furniture is there, but there's nobody there. It looks like it has been lived in for a while. They just pack up and leave overnight."
The bikers' determination gives mothers like Johnson hope they'll find her son.
"I'm hoping that maybe if I do talk some more, he'll see it," Johnson said. "I need to know that he is alive and that he's okay. I haven't changed my phone number all these years because I'm hoping that maybe someday, he'll have the courage or even the ability to pick up a phone and call me."
Road warriors for the missing are currently trying to locate eight children within the FLDS Church community. They're hopeful that by going public with these cases, it'll generate more leads.
"We won't stop until we get them all," Clark said.
