Who goes missing in Singapore?

For families caring for elderly loved ones – especially those with dementia – a disappearance rarely begins with a dramatic vanishing. It begins quietly, with a slip.

Madam Joyce Lau, 56, knows this too well.

The eldest of three siblings, she is the primary caregiver for her 82-year-old father, Mr Lau Sung Pong, who was diagnosed with dementia more than a decade ago.

Her father lived with her younger brother, and the household included a domestic helper who helped to look after the elderly man. Despite his dementia, Mr Lau was independent, taking public buses, visiting regular spots and rarely staying home for long.

In the early years, the slips were manageable: he misplaced his belongings, forgot his debit-card PIN and occasionally missed his bus stop. Worrying, but controllable.

In the past year, however, Madam Lau lived in a state of near-constant vigilance. On several occasions, her father would leave and simply not come home.

Each time, the self-employed consultant filed a missing person report and drove through the neighbourhoods and routes he was known to frequent. Each time, it was an attentive stranger – a passer-by, or a security guard – who noticed something was wrong and called the family using the old man’s phone.

But in May, the drifting turned into a chasm: Mr Lau disappeared for seven days.

“I dedicated my days from early morning to late at night to search familiar and unfamiliar areas, coordinating family, friends and even community members,” Madam Lau says.

As days passed, her anxiety and fear were relentless.

Singapore’s density – usually a comfort – became a maze.

The Apple AirTag in Mr Lau’s sling bag appeared to be out of range. The only clue came from his ez-link card, last tapped to exit Woodleigh MRT station.

Madam Lau imagined her elderly father, who was without his blood pressure medication, wandering around, confused, unable to ask for help.

She braced herself for the worst.

“Although I still had hopes of finding him alive, I was terrified that even if I did, he might no longer be able to speak to me,” she recalls.

Just as she was mobilising more than 20 volunteers for an expanded search, an alert from his AirTag came through.

Police and family rushed to the location, a new Build-To-Order (BTO) estate. A construction worker had found him on the rooftop of a BTO block, conscious but unable to speak, next to a water tank. AirTags rely on nearby Apple devices to relay their signal, and often do not work in unpopulated areas. Mr Lau’s location was finally detected when the worker went close to him.

Mr Lau was rushed to Tan Tock Seng Hospital, weak and dehydrated.

Madam Lau still does not know how her father ended up where he did.

“It was a devastating feeling. I really hope it will not happen to others,” she says.

After the ordeal, she and her siblings decided to place their father in a nursing home, where he would be under constant supervision.

“I can tell that he was upset with me initially. He refused to eat. But I would rather he be safe and under professional care than risk his safety,” says Madam Lau, who visits him weekly.

For families of people with dementia, the possibility of a loved one going missing is a constant fear.

According to Dementia Singapore, whose CARA app allows caregivers to report missing loved ones, an average of two such cases are flagged every month to CARA users, who can help keep a lookout.

Not everyone who vanishes is missing. Some are hiding.

Take Andrea (not her real name). Now 25, she ran away more than a dozen times as a teenager. She and her three siblings were raised by their grandmother, while their parents went in and out of jail for drug offences.

“Our idea of family wasn’t like our classmates’,” she says. “No tuition, no family dinners, no weekends together.

“We thought no one would care if something happened to us, except our grandmother.”

After-school hours soon became nights spent outside. By 14, she often slept at friends’ homes. Feeling neglected and short of money, she and her friends began stealing food, clothes and later alcohol.

Her grandmother – then in her 60s and juggling several jobs – threatened to call the police, but to no avail. Andrea was eventually caught shoplifting and given a police warning.

Her rebelliousness soon saw her placed in a girls’ home, which curtailed her disappearing acts. She got into trouble with the law again at 21, after she was caught for being in possession of drugs, which saw her put behind bars for almost a year.

Now a waitress, she sees running away as “rebellion and survival”. She and her siblings, aged between 20 and 28, have reconciled with their grandmother and apologised for the pain they have caused her.

Impart, a charity supporting young people facing mental health struggles, family conflict, financial hardship or homelessness, encounters missing person cases about once a month.

“Some become police cases. Some don’t,” says Impart co-founder Narasimman Tivasiha Mani.

Reasons for running away vary, but young people often leave when they feel misunderstood or unheard, or believe they do not matter, says Dr Raksha Kartik, a clinical psychologist working with Impart’s network.

Mr Narasimman identifies four broad types of teen runaways: the depressed and isolated; the easy-going teen who loses track of time; the “professional” runaway who plans an escape; and the angry or rebellious teen who leaves after a major quarrel.

“Runaway youths tend to seek out places or people they feel safe with,” he says.

Caseworkers often have better luck locating them than parents or police, as they know the young person’s routines, hangouts and friends.

It is a mistake simply to label runaway teens as “naughty” or “defiant”, says Mr Narasimman.

“Most are trying to express their needs. If your house was truly safe, no one would run away,” he says.

Dr Kartik says: “When a young person returns, the focus is on rebuilding connection and trust while assessing the support and checkpoints needed.”

And it is not just teenagers who run away. Mental health professionals note that people of any age can be driven by emotional pain, shame or an overwhelming need to escape.

“Leaving can feel like the only way to find relief,” says clinical psychologist Kimberly Chew, noting that such disappearances can be a “flight response” to intense emotional distress or perceived threat.

For some, disappearing is a coping mechanism, a temporary attempt to escape circumstances that feel unbearable.

Psychiatrist Jared Ng says that untreated mental illness or dissociation can also blur a person’s sense of reality, causing the person to withdraw suddenly.

A rare but striking example is dissociative fugue, a condition where a person loses memory of his identity and wanders away from his usual surroundings.

“Such cases are extremely uncommon,” says Dr Ng, who has seen only two or three in his career.

In one case, a woman missing for weeks was found living with an elderly stranger, with no memory of how she ended up there. In another, a man who vanished for 12 years was discovered homeless in Kuala Lumpur and was later diagnosed with schizophrenia.

When someone is reported missing, the machinery of the state whirs into motion – a mix of old-fashioned detective work and one of the world’s most sophisticated surveillance systems.

The police triage each case immediately.

“We look into factors such as the missing person’s mental health and the circumstances under which they were last seen,” says a police spokesman.

Priority is given to vulnerable groups, including children, seniors and individuals with neurological conditions such as dementia and autism, as well as those with psychiatric conditions like schizophrenia.

Then the eyes of the city open. Lookout messages and appeals for information are rapidly circulated, especially in areas where the person was last spotted, so officers on the ground can keep watch.

Beyond the police, multiple agencies – from schools and hospitals to the Ministry of Social and Family Development (MSF) – are alerted to help track the missing person.

Under the 2012 PolCam initiative, more than 10,000 police cameras were installed in Housing Board blocks and multi-storey carparks.

The network was later expanded under PolCam 2.0 in 2016 to cover public spaces such as town centres, hawker centres and linkways to MRT stations and bus interchanges.

The system has proved effective in locating vulnerable individuals. In one case in April 2020, officers used PolCam footage to trace a missing elderly person in north-eastern Singapore within three hours of a report being filed.

PolCam cameras are equipped with video analytics and sense-making tools that can swiftly scan both live and recorded footage for visual cues such as clothing, build or hairstyle. They allow officers to track a person’s movements across multiple camera feeds and pinpoint his last known location.

The “digital kampung” also plays a role. In recent years, virtual noticeboards have begun popping up on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok as dedicated spaces where appeals to locate missing people are shared and amplified.

In 2017, Mr Leslie Lee, 43, a former paramedic, started Missing Persons Singapore, a Facebook community which now boasts more than 6,200 members. The educator started the page after his aunt with dementia went missing, and he found no central hub for information.

Having spent 15 years riding with ambulances, he also knew what could happen if help arrives too late.

The community is largely self-sustaining. Users share alerts, keep a lookout and take down posts once their loved ones are found.

“Most people usually get found within a day or two,” says Mr Lee, who runs the site with his wife.

The couple moderate the page, flag potential scams and request information when appeals lack key details.

At the end of 2025, the page still had about 30 posts on people listed as missing.

Another Facebook page, Reunite Missing Children, focuses on locating children, especially those with special needs.

The page, which has more than 8,500 followers, was created in 2018 by Madam Sun Meilan, whose 18-year-old son has the most severe classification of autism. She now runs it with two other parents – Mr Bob Lee and Mr Edward Chan, both also fathers of children with autism.

The trio started the page after noticing what Madam Sun called a “dire lack of support” for special needs families when a child goes missing.

“The page is completely ground-up,” says Madam Sun. “It’s run by the three of us and has grown by word of mouth.”

The group’s page was the first to confirm that Hairil’s body had been found, a day after he was reported missing.

Many families have limited support, says Madam Sun, and may not even use social media.

“Having a community page helps rally support, so families don’t have to deal with this alone.”

The page updates cases to prevent outdated alerts from continuing to circulate and cause confusion.

Still, for families searching on the ground, not every tip is a lifeline. False leads can deepen the anguish, raising hope only to dash it again.

Madam Lau recalls how well-meaning strangers telephoned her during the seven days her father was missing, claiming they had seen him hours earlier.

“If you tell me it’s 10 minutes ago, yes, I can accept it. But 10 hours ago, eight hours ago – long gone,” she says.

What is more effective than social media posts that may not be seen promptly by others, she adds, is timely action by people who notice something amiss before an alert ever reaches social media.

That was the case in September 2025, when Ms Naimi Adia, 27, and Ms Nur Fazeerah, 29, former co-workers at Pertapis Children’s Home, intervened after spotting two young siblings who had run away.

While visiting a relative in hospital, they recognised a 10-year-old girl and her nine-year-old brother who had previously lived at the home wandering around the hospital lobby.

“I said, ‘Hello!’, because I got excited seeing them,” recalls Ms Naimi.

The children, still in school uniforms and damp with sweat, looked uneasy. As far as Ms Naimi knew, they were supposed to be living with their grandmother in Punggol.

When gently asked why they were at the hospital, the older girl replied simply: “We want to run away.”

Sensing something was wrong, the women persuaded the siblings to wait with them at the hospital foodcourt while they called the police.

Over beverages, the children explained that after being dropped off at their Yishun home, they had tried to go to their grandmother’s home but had no money for transport and ended up just wandering.

“They are children with a history of difficult experiences, and if handled wrongly, they can become agitated or scared,” says Ms Naimi. After leaving the Pertapis home, the siblings had been moved between several homes and relatives, where some neglect persisted.

Only after the women returned home did they realise that social media alerts about the missing children had already been circulating for hours.

The siblings were later linked up with a child protection officer, taken to a police station to wait for their caregivers and reunited with their relatives.

Tragically, some missing people are never found.

In 1986, two 12-year-olds, Keh Chin Ann and Toh Hong Huat, vanished while walking to school in Owen Road.

They later became known as the “McDonald’s Boys”, after the fast-food chain offered a $100,000 reward for information that could lead to their recovery, a move that etched their disappearance into Singapore’s collective memory.

Despite extensive investigations and kidnapping theories, the two were never found.

Another well-known case was that of Kouk Leong Jin, a Singaporean medical student who disappeared in Athens in September 2011. He never showed up at a conference where he was scheduled to present a paper, and no confirmed sightings have surfaced since. As at 2025, Mr Kouk remains missing.

For long-term missing person cases, the police regularly review investigations, searching for new leads.

One such case was that of Ms Felicia Teo, who vanished in 2007. On the night the 19-year-old disappeared, she appeared to slip entirely off the grid. Her mother made a police report on July 3 that year, saying her daughter had been missing since June 29.

Her friends and family mounted an extensive search. They were convinced she had not run away, despite online speculation.

More than 200 people joined the search, distributing thousands of fliers. Her friends and relatives contacted her telecommunications provider for phone records and monitored her social media accounts.

The family ran newspaper advertisements and even extended their search across the border to Johor Bahru.

In June 2010, excavation works at Punggol Track 24 uncovered a partial human skull, though it could not be identified at the time.

From 2007 to 2020, police continued checks, including immigration screenings, bank audits and hospital and mortuary searches. The case remained stalled until a breakthrough in 2020 – new leads emerged from tracing items believed to have been with Ms Teo when she vanished. Ahmad Danial Mohamed Rafa’ee, a former Lasalle College of the Arts classmate of Ms Teo’s, was arrested.

Ahmad had been questioned by police in 2007 but claimed then that he did not know what had happened to her. During a 2020 review of the case, he admitted he had been involved in disposing of her remains and her belongings, and that he had not been truthful earlier.

Another man, Indonesian national Ragil Putra Setia Sukmarahjana, was allegedly also involved and remains at large.

DNA testing later confirmed that the skull most likely belonged to Ms Teo.

In October 2022, Ahmad was sentenced to 26 months’ jail on four charges relating to Ms Teo’s death, including disposing of her body and giving false evidence to police. But how she died – and whether she was killed – remains unknown. To date, only her skull has been recovered.

Cases like Ms Teo’s illustrate how missing person investigations can stretch over years with few leads, leaving families in agonising and prolonged uncertainty.

According to a 2017 study published in the peer-reviewed journal Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, the disappearance of a loved one is the most stressful type of loss a human being can experience.

For a long time, many of Ms Teo’s loved ones clung to the hope that she would be found.

By 2011, her mother was telling anyone who asked about her daughter that she had settled abroad.

In an interview with The Sunday Times that year, she said she found comfort in imagining that her daughter had married and moved to a different country.

Dr Ng, the psychiatrist, says: “(Families of missing people) live with what we call ambiguous loss, or grief without closure.” Loved ones, he adds, oscillate between hope and despair, not knowing whether to mourn or wait.

“This uncertainty can last for years, often leading to self-blame, anxiety, depression or strained relationships.”

This is the anguish that consumes Ms Daylin Limonte, 37, every day.

In the bedroom she once shared with her seven-year-old son, she says softly: “He’s getting bigger now, so we’d need a larger place where he can have his own room.”

It has been more than a year and a half since Ms Limonte last held him.

A Cuban-born naturalised Singaporean, Ms Limonte married a Singaporean man in 2017 and gave birth to their son the following year. The marriage broke up soon after, and the couple divorced in 2021. They were granted shared custody of the child.

“I cared for him every day, except for 24 hours when he visited his father on the weekends,” she says.

Tension between the divorced couple was common. On several occasions, she called the police when her former husband refused to return their son after visits.

In May 2024, after one of those weekend handovers, he never came back with the boy.

Immigration records later showed her former husband had taken their son to Malaysia, and has not returned.

“He’d refused to return him before, but he’d never left the country. I thought he was still nearby, and that I’d get him back,” she says.

As at the time of publication, it has been 593 days since she last saw her son. She managed one brief video call a few days after he was taken across the border, before her former husband cut off all contact.

Since 2010, Singapore has been a signatory to the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. The treaty helps ensure that children taken out of their home country without a custodial parent’s consent can be returned, allowing courts to settle decisions about their care.

MSF, which is the designated Singapore Central Authority that oversees cases under the Hague Convention, has handled 22 cases where a child was taken from Singapore to a signatory nation between 2019 and 2024.

It has also handled 21 cases where a child was brought to Singapore from a signatory nation. “These children were taken to or from countries such as the United Kingdom, Australia and Japan in these cases,” said a spokesman.

Complications arise, however, when a child is taken to a country that is not a signatory of the treaty, as in the case of Ms Limonte’s son. Malaysia is not part of the convention.

An MSF spokesman told The Sunday Times that parents searching for missing children in non-Hague Convention countries may face “jurisdictional and legal hurdles”, having to navigate different legal systems with varying definitions and procedures for parental rights and custody.

“This can make it much harder to obtain legal assistance or enforce custody orders across borders,” says the spokesman.

Despite sole-custody orders from both Singaporean and Malaysian courts, an Interpol Red Notice and a listing on Malaysia’s National Urgent Response system – which shares photos and last known locations of missing children under 12 who may be victims of crime or abuse – Ms Limonte’s son remains missing.

Mental health counsellor Ms Lee, who works with families of missing people, says ambiguous loss can leave deep and enduring scars.

“Families live with uncertainty, not knowing if their loved one is alive or dead. This disrupts closure and can lead to prolonged stress, anxiety, guilt and denial.”

Beyond emotional pain, families also face practical burdens such as legal and financial complications, Ms Lee adds.

Describing the past year and a half as a “living nightmare”, Ms Limonte, who has hired a private investigator and launched awareness campaigns in Malaysia, says she is focusing on her health and holding on to hope.

“I don’t have any doubt that I’ll find him. It’s just a matter of when,” she says. “I want to give him the life and education he deserves. He has to be somewhere. Nobody can hide forever.”

She adds quietly: “I don’t know where my son is. Is he safe? Is he happy?”

Despite Singapore’s robust surveillance network and community response, the tragedies of Hairil and anxieties faced by those like Ms Limonte show that more needs to be done to protect vulnerable people in Singapore.

Solutions are rarely as simple as telling caregivers to “watch more closely”, say advocates.

“Families cannot keep their loved ones with dementia locked up at home all the time. It’s important for them to go out regularly,” says Mr Bernard Lim, advocacy and communications director at Dementia Singapore.

For caregivers, the stakes can be terrifyingly high, and the burden of searching often falls heavily on them.

Hairil’s case highlights similar vulnerabilities. Described as “heartbreaking” by a special education teacher, Teacher A, Hairil’s death shows how children with developmental challenges may not communicate distress in ways others recognise – and often rely on strangers for help. The teacher declined to be named for work reasons.

“If more people understood how to identify and safely support a child with special needs, we might prevent tragedies like this,” Teacher A says.

Empathy is also crucial. Online discussions of runaway cases can add another layer of stress for families.

“We see the same harmful patterns: victim-blaming and unfounded assumptions,” says Mr Narasimman from Impart.

“Families already struggling with the pain of a missing child don’t need judgment. They need empathy.”