His case, happily, ended the way so many do, with his return home, but his parents’ relief has given way to new anxiety. They still do not know where he spent nine excruciating days in May.
“He said he was on the subway, he got off the subway, walked the streets,” his mother, Jennifer, said. “Get back on the subway, go to the library. He said he slept on the subway.” The family’s last name is being withheld in hopes of keeping this reminder of a troubled episode out of Internet searches for the rest of the boy’s life.
Children disappear in this city, and the city has a way of nudging them back home. The police send out e-mails with descriptions and pictures, and parents make their own “Missing” posters and put them up on lamp poles and, lately, on Facebook, the new milk carton.
Kids run away, or they get lost, or they are the subject of a communication mix-up between a mother and an aunt. But whatever happened to Denzel has refused to fall into any typical explanation, and suggests countless eyes passed over him without pausing.
If he knows where he was, he is not telling. More is known about what did not happen to him. His mother said he was given a rigorous exam by his doctor, who administered a wide variety of tests for drugs and disease. All negative, she said.
Jennifer, 50, works nights as a nurse’s aide at a nursing home, and Denzel is the baby of her three children. He had received a diagnosis of attention deficit disorder and was struggling in school. “His concentration level is very poor,” his mother said. “He doesn’t complain about anything. He’s a jolly child. He’s a bit withdrawn lately, but I don’t see anything that tells me he’s going to run away.”
She was at work and her husband was asleep when the boy disappeared from their brick home in the Wakefield neighborhood of the northern Bronx before dawn on May 17. Denzel ran away from home twice before, but just overnight. The family called the police, and detectives took his school picture from a year ago.
Then, nothing.
No calls. The picture appeared on several Web sites. There was one reported sighting of Denzel, but it was false. Jennifer said she called Facebook, a site Denzel had increasingly visited on their home computer, but Facebook would not give her Denzel’s password without a detective’s request. The police said such a request requires a subpoena, but detectives were able to monitor activity on Denzel’s page, and saw none. Days passed after his disappearance on that Tuesday. The week ended. She was terrified that the boy’s gentle demeanor would bring him harm on the streets.
The weekend came and went.
Where would he go to use a computer? She visited libraries around her neighborhood. “I asked them to put the picture up inside,” Jennifer said, “but not so he could see it,” lest he panic and flee. The Wakefield branch had a better idea: an investigator for the library, Victor Nieves, attached a flag to his account, so that if Denzel used his card, a note with Mr. Nieves’s number would pop up on a librarian’s screen.
Thankfully, the plan did not have time to work. On the night of May 25, Denzel materialized, in the form of a dirty, gaunt boy, at his aunt’s front door in the Bronx. “His eyes were red,” Jennifer said. “Of course, he was skinny. He looked scared.”
His mother peppered him with questions. What did you eat? Where did you sleep? Did anyone abuse you? He said no, but little else.
“He came out of character, is how you would say it,” said Lt. Christopher Zimmerman with the Missing Persons Squad of the police. “I’m trying to be gentle with the wording. He is a 12-year-old boy.”
A psychiatrist examined Denzel on Tuesday, eight days after his reappearance. “The psychiatrist said he’s charming, but not talking,” Jennifer said. He was admitted for more tests. His father thinks hospitalization is an overreaction. The boy needs to talk to someone, that’s all.
For his mother, this not-knowing is torture. Her boy is back, but this piece of his 12-year-old life is still missing. She tells herself she should have seen this, as if mental distress were a bloody nose or a skinned knee.
“I thought I was doing a good job, but something slipped by me,” Jennifer said this week, in tears. “If someone saw him, they can say, ‘I saw him here, begging.’ That would be something.”
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E-mail: crimescene@nytimes.com.