BELLEVUE, WI (WTAQ) – It’s a gathering that no one wishes to be a part of, but one they all gain strength from.
The 5th Annual Missing Persons Awareness event held at the Brown County Sheriff’s Office Saturday.
The gathering, which included everything from speakers to a silent auction, is the brainchild of Marsha Loritz. And it’s grown.
“We have a lot more vendors, a lot more organizations that assist the missing. Trafficking, or other various venues to keep people safe.”
But the truth is, organizing an event like this gets Marsha Loritz through a particularly difficult time of the year.
“Today pulls me through a long time. My hardest days are coming.”
April 25th will mark 6 years since her mother, Victoria Prokopovitz, went missing from her Pittsfield home.
Loritz says it was heartbreaking to see the rollercoaster the family of Timothy Pitzen had to go through last week when a person came forward claiming he was the kidnap victim, who broke away from his captors after being held since 2011. It turned out to be a hoax.
Loritz says missing kids get most of the media attention, and that’s OK. But that’s the point of establishing April as ‘Missing Persons Awareness Month’ in Wisconsin.
She wants all missing people, children, and adults, to be important.
The money raised through the auction and other activities helps pay for the highway billboards you see and other media outreach to keep the faces of the missing in the public eye all year long.
