By LEDEDRA FERGUSON Senior Freeport News Reporter lededra@nasguard.com

FREEPORT – Plagued with three high-profile cases of missing boys since May, police now have a fourth one on their hands.

The public's fear that another young boy would disappear on Grand Bahama became reality Tuesday night, when the mother of 11-year-old Junior Reme filed a missing person's report.

Myrthi Jean-Tinord, a 32-year-old homemaker, told police her son left his Garden Villas home on Weddell Avenue around 9:30 that morning and didn't returned.

The worried mother said Junior asked her for $4 to purchase snacks at a movie but she refused and told him to stay at home to tend to his younger siblings.

Jean-Tinord told The Freeport News the last time she saw her son he was watching television. She had stepped out of the room and when she returned, he was gone.

Petrified after he failed to come home after dark, she said she spoke with all of Junior's friends and went by the grocery store, but no one had seen him.

Junior's case bears a striking resemblance to that of three other boys who disappeared days apart in May.

Jake Grant, 12, vanished on May 9; Mackinson Colas, 11 on May 16; and DeAngelo McKenzie, 13, on May 27. All of the boys vanished without a trace and were all from the Freeport area.

Jake is a seventh-grader and DeAngelo an eighth-grader at Jack Hayward High School, while Mackinson is a sixth-grade student at Lewis Yard Primary.

The first of a series of billboards was erected Tuesday to help keep their disappearances fresh in the public's mind and two separate rewards, $75,000 and $10,000, are being offered for information leading to the boys.

"Three children [have] gone missing and I think that Junior [is] missing too," said a distraught Mrs. Jean-Tinord. "He can't stay out late just like that."

She said there was no fight or argument and her son has never stayed away from home this long and she is pleading for anyone who knows of her son's whereabouts to come forward.

'I don't feel better. I don't feel okay because I don't find my son yesterday or today," she said.

Mrs. Jean-Tinord said she is unable to sleep and Junior's two brothers and three sisters believe he is "already gone."

Junior is a fifth-grade student at Freeport Primary and worked as a packer at a downtown grocery store for about a year.

His father, Isidel Jean-Tinord, a gardener, said Junior would get off at 9 p.m. and be home by 10 p.m.

"Yesterday I leave him home asleep, when I come in from work I ask my wife for him," he said and that's when she told him what transpired.

Mr. Jean-Tinord has no idea where his son could be.

The young Haitian national weighs 94 lbs., is of slim build, 5'7", brown complexion, has a low neat-trimmed haircut and was last seen wearing a blue shirt, black pants and black Nike tennis shoes.

Press liaison Superintendent Basil Rahming confirmed yesterday that police have launched an intensive investigation.

Posted Thursday 31 July, 2003