I Was a Missing Child — Just Not the Kind You're Thinking Of

My mother taught me to sing “Oh! Susanna” wrong on purpose.

Not the whole song — just one line. Instead of “I’m coming from Alabama…”, she taught me “I’m coming to Alabama…”. One word. Small change. But I was five years old and completely delighted, belting it out in the cab of a U-Haul somewhere in the dark between Oklahoma and the rest of my life.

She had one rule: don’t sing it in front of anyone.

I didn’t fully understand why at the time. But I understood enough. We were disappearing. And secrets — even the fun kind — mean something is at stake.

I was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. My parents divorced when I was one and remarried when I was two — just not to each other. We lived in a double-wide trailer with thirteen dogs outside, all named after music genres — Rock, Jazz, Blues, Rhythm. I thought we were just chaotic pet owners.

We weren’t.

The locked room at the end of the hall, the one I wasn’t allowed near, was stacked floor to ceiling with kilos flown in from Jamaica. The dogs weren’t pets. They were an early warning system. So: not a typical childhood.

Every other weekend, I had to visit my biological father. He wasn’t violent. He loved me. But he had a serious drinking problem, and his home was in a constant, low-grade war. I was a kid absorbing all of it. I’d cry before I left. I’d come home crying. Rinse, repeat. Twice a month. Mandated by the State of Oklahoma.

My mother and stepfather tried everything to change the arrangement. When nothing worked, they chose the only option left: They packed a U-Haul and disappeared into the night. 

We went to Alabama — just like the song — and hid there for six months. Then resurfaced in Florida, section 8 housing, my mom as the building manager. For the first time in my life, I didn’t have to go back every other weekend. I was six years old. And I was genuinely happy.

Somewhere behind us, my father hired a detective.

This was the 1980s. No internet. No quiet searches. “Missing child” technology meant the back of a milk carton. Given that it took more than three years to find me, I've always assumed that if I did appear on one, it was probably the back of an almond milk carton at a Whole Foods in San Francisco — not exactly a high-traffic medium for locating a kid who'd relocated to Florida.

Eventually, they found us. We went to court. I was nine years old, sitting in a wood-paneled room. A child psychologist had evaluated me beforehand. His conclusion? I was probably an angry child. His evidence: my favorite animal was a tiger.

Think about that.

A full psychological assessment reduced to a single data point. Not the repeated exposure to a dysfunctional environment. Not the pattern of distress. Not the fact that we’d been living in hiding. The tiger.

I didn’t trust the system before that. After that, I trusted it even less.

The court ultimately ruled that I could stay in Florida. I still had to spend a month every summer in Tulsa with my father — until I was about fourteen, when my father’s drinking escalated to the point where he clinically died and was brought back. He never drank again. We rebuilt our relationship in my twenties. It’s one of the better things that happened in my life.

I eventually grew up, moved into computers and games, and in 2002 found myself as one of co-founders of Infinity Ward — the studio behind Call of Duty. I spent years in that world, building things, shipping things, eventually leaving.

Eventually, I left. Years later, At a Google Next event where I was pitching a VR conferencing startup, I met Dr. Brook Bello. She asked me a simple question: Could VR help survivors of trafficking stay connected to their therapists? I told her I was almost certain it could.

That conversation eventually became VR EVAL, and later, Coming Home. A collaborative case management platform and mobile app designed for service providers working with survivors of trauma. A web app for organizations. A mobile app for survivors. Not to manage people — but to work with them.

Here's the thing I keep coming back to when I think about my own story: nobody in it was evil. Not my father. Not the court. Not the psychologist. 

The problem wasn’t malice. It was information, or more precisely, the lack of it.. Back then, information was poorly shared between the people who needed it, it moved slowly when it did exist, and none of it captured what was actually happening to a child between the moments the system could see. Because the truth doesn’t live in a one-hour session. It lives in the in-between.

If someone had been tracking, in any organized way — the crying before visits, the crying after, the aftermath, the accumulation — that’s a different conversation in court. If a case manager had a complete, shared view of my situation, and I had a voice in it, maybe we never needed the U-Haul. Maybe we never need a secret version of a folk song.

That technology didn’t exist in 1987. But it does now.

That’s the only pitch I’ll make. If you work with survivors, or systems meant to support them — you already understand the gap. If you’re curious about how we’re trying to close it, get in touch.

The rest — the tiger, the milk cartons, the thirteen dogs named after music genres — is just the story I had to live before I understood what I was supposed to build.