On October 30th, 2020, 15 year old teen Quawan “Bobby” Charles from Baldwin, LA went missing. His mother had planned to pick him up for a haircut at 3pm, but he didn’t respond to her calls. When his phone was still unreachable at 7pm, his father forced open his locked bedroom door and found it empty. Worried, he called the local police only to be told that Quawan was probably at a football game with friends. They later found out that Quawan had been picked up by his friend’s mother Janet Irvin around 3pm, the same time his mother was scheduled to pick him up. Irvin claimed that Quawan was indeed with her son for that period of time, but he left their house on his own.
The Irvins lived in local Iberia Parish, where the local investigators were phoned by Quawan’s parents on November 3rd, days after his disappearance. Hours into their investigation, they found Quawan’s mutilated body in a field after pinging his cell phone. Both preliminary Iberia Parish and later independent autopsy reports determine that Quawan’s ultimate cause of death was drowning. Coroners in the preliminary report found muddy water in Quawan’s hyperinflated lungs.
The case garnered national attention when Quawan’s family made a GoFundMe page for his independent autopsy. The choice to display his disfigured face on the page was inspired by the decision of Emmett Till’s mother to hold an open casket funeral. Many people have drawn parallels between Emmett’s case in 1955 to Quawan’s case today.
Emmett Till was a 14 year old African American boy who was abducted from his great-uncle’s home and lynched in Mississippi during the Jim-Crow era of the South. Despite its tragedy Emmett Till’s death served as a catalyst for a strengthened civil rights movement in the South. The slow reveal of Quawan’s case raises a frightening question with an even scarier answer. Has anything fundamentally changed in the last several decades since Emmett Till’s appalling death? To many, Quawan’s death is just America’s shameful history repeating itself.
In the months since the case has made national headlines, shocked the public, and ultimately fizzled into oblivion through the shifts of the ever changing news cycle, the first new development came on January 19th in the form of an independent toxicology report. The Irvins had previously told investigators that Quawan was high on mushrooms and left after an argument. However, the report revealed that there were trace amounts of THC and a blood alcohol content of 0.014 but no signs of hallucinogens in Quawan’s body.
Weeks after Quawan’s body was found, witnesses say they saw the Irvins packing their belongings in a U-Haul van outside their home. The report raised new suspicions about the degree of Janet Irvins’ involvement in Quawan’s death. Quawan’s family continues to fight for the arrest of Janet Irvin, the last woman to be seen with Quawan. She could face charges for neglect and failure to report missing child to the police, which would be added to her extensive criminal history of drug possession, theft, and domestic violence.
Another problem with this case that is unfortunately nothing new was the lack of urgency and failure of the police to act on time. Regardless of the circumstances of Quawan’s death, the complacency of the local police in his investigation is undeniably rooted in racism. If the police had issued the Amber Alert the day Quawan was reported missing, it could have saved his life.
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Written By: Volunteer Lucy Liu
Date Published: 03/26/2021
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SOURCES:
Fazio, Marie. “Disappearance and Death of Louisiana Teen Raises Questions About Police Response.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 15 Nov. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/11/14/us/quawan-charles-bobby-louisiana.html.
Lofaso, Britt. “Nearly Three Months after Quawan ‘Bobby’ Charles' Mysterious Death, Here's Where the Investigation Stands.” KLFY, Nexstar, 27 Jan. 2021, www.klfy.com/st-mary-parish/nearly-three-months-after-quawan-bobby-charles-mysterious-death-heres-where-the-investigation-stands/.
Schlosberg, Jon Schlosberg, et al. “‘Suspicious’ Circumstances around Black Teen Found Dead in Louisiana.” ABC News, ABC News Network, 12 Nov. 2020, abcnews.go.com/US/suspicious-circumstances-black-teen-found-dead-louisiana/story?id=74180637.
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