For Senior Inspector Laura Tierney, a proclivity towards investigation has always been in her nature, even long before she embarked on her 15 year long career with the US Marshals, or her now 4 year long tenure as the Marshals’ Liaison to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).
Of her natural born passion for public safety and service, Tierney explains that “I wanted to help people. I wanted to be able to help people in need or help solve crime and prevent crime, and just be able to respond to things as needed.”
So when the opportunity to help spearhead Operation We Will Find You – a nationwide search and rescue mission with the aim to locate hundreds of those missing on NCMEC’s registry – emerged, Tierney was ready to put her investigative instincts to use to protect our communities’ most vulnerable.
Senior Inspector Laura Tierney
Over the course of just 10 weeks, and spanning cities nationwide as well as internationally, the Marshals involved in Operation We Will Find You located a total of 225 missing children. Of those children, 169 were recovered and brought home definitively, while the remaining 56 were marked safely located in the eyes of NCMEC and its coordinating agencies. Some of the children recovered were even as young as 6 months old.
The very first national missing child’s rescue mission of its kind, Operation We Will Find You not only needed to perform extensive searches across 16 federal regions, but in doing so also demanded a unique level of cooperation between local, state and federal agencies not typically accustomed to sharing investigative duties. Completely multidisciplinary in its partnerships and approach, the Operation brought together deputies, local law enforcement, state attorney’s offices, welfare services, child advocacy centers and more in order to ensure each search was carried out exhaustively.
Almost 20% of the endangered children whose cases were under scrutiny were ultimately found in different jurisdictions than those from which their initial missing reports were made. Another 28 cases necessitated supplementary investigations into drug, weapon and/or sex trafficking. Aside from underscoring exactly how far the perils faced by these endangered children range, the complex and cross-jurisdictional elements of their rescues also proved teamwork and communication to be key.
In order to facilitate such a high-level, multi-pronged operation, leadership informed by a deep level of insight into the problems faced by those under search was a must, which is where Tierney’s expertise within the Marshals’ Missing Child Unit came into play.
As NCMEC Liaison, Tierney has an awareness of each agency’s ability to build upon each other’s strengths, allowing for such an operation to get off the ground in tandem when alone it might be insurmountable. “A lot of people in Marshals Services and local law enforcement, a lot of people don’t realize all of the resources that NCMEC has to offer,” Tierney says, “And so I was working really hard to promote those resources and to try to share all of the information that they have and all about how beneficial they can be towards this mission.”
Tierney also brings to her work a keen awareness of who is most likely to be impacted — whether it be due to running away, stranger abduction or non-custodial parental kidnapping — and likewise where to start when it comes to bringing them home again.
Beyond just its massive scale, Operation We Will Find You was a highly unusual mission in terms of targets for the US Marshals – an agency historically developed to track down fugitives. Only in the past decade or so have the Marshals veered their efforts in the direction of bringing home victims of crime in addition to perpetrators, with a focus on missing children specifically beginning to take shape around 2015. Still lacking the structures needed to launch a full-scale search and rescue mission, it wasn’t until 2022 that Operation We Will Find You truly began to take off, with Tierney’s team at the helm.
Involved in everything from parsing through tips submitted to NCMEC to providing for the needs of the children once located by the Marshals, Tierney and her colleagues moved nearly every step of each investigation forward across both agencies. One of the biggest aspects of her position, however, was the training required of each agent before stepping into the field, which alone was a task of massive scope due to the sheer complexity of missing children’s cases.
A question Tierney received frequently during the trainings and case briefings she led for Operation We Will Find You was why expend resources looking for someone who chose to leave in the first place. To this, Tierney explains that the act of running away isn’t so much a choice as it is an act forced by the pre-existing danger of their lives at home: “Once you start learning what the background is for these children, a lot of times, they’re being trafficked at home. You’ve got kids whose parents are selling them, for drug money or rent money, or other family members are assaulting them…And so, of course, they’re probably going to run away and think that they can do better out on the street. And unfortunately, it’s just a vicious cycle.”
More work is needed to educate law enforcement, partner agencies and the broader community as a whole on the reasons why many children are at high-risk of going missing, according to Tierney. Battling misconceptions of situations involving runaways – who comprise roughly 94% of the cases taken on by the Marshals — especially can prove a challenge, as it involves rethinking our understanding of who these children are and the situations from which they have fled in order to garner a deeper understanding of what lies ahead for them without intervention.
Still, Tierney is hopeful that a continued partnership between the US Marshals and organizations such as NCMEC can only strengthen community approaches to investigation, and therefore lead to more successful search and rescue missions such as Operation We Will Find You. Similar ongoing outreach programs with NCMEC are already in the works, and Tierney is constantly working to ramp up training efforts to get more deputies from the Missing Child Unit out in the field.
When it comes to being a good detective, though, Tierney attributes a lot of the skill to simple, tried and true teamwork: “I would say the ability to work as a team, to realize that success is often due to a team and not just an individual. Being open minded, obviously having passion for the mission, and the ability to work really long hours.”
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