The family of Makala Pendley, a 30-year-old Indianapolis woman who vanished earlier this year while traveling in Mexico with her seven children, now fears she is dead, and no one can account for the kids.
Pendley's sister, Maurica Lambert, told the Indianapolis Star that the family is working with Mexican law enforcement to identify a body found near the village of Zinacantán in the state of Chiapas, in southern Mexico. Tattoos on the body led the family to believe it is Pendley.
Lambert described the moment in terms no family member should ever have to use.
"It's the worst day of my life. I feel like a part of me is dead."
The whereabouts of Pendley's seven children, ranging in age from 1 to 12, remain unknown. That fact alone should alarm every parent, every law enforcement official, and every child welfare agency with jurisdiction over this case.
Pendley and her children were reported missing from Indianapolis on February 23, USA TODAY reported, citing the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Two days later, on February 25, an Indiana Department of Child Services family case manager filed a report with police identifying Pendley as missing.
The children are Nikola Jude Butler, 12; Joseph Jude Butler, 10; Aubrielle Oriana Butler, 8; Orion Jude Butler, 7; Earthum Jude Butler, 5; Polaris Jude Butler, 3; and Azrael Jude Butler, 1.
That a DCS case manager, not a neighbor, not a friend, was the one who flagged Pendley as missing raises its own set of questions. It suggests the family was already on the state's radar before the disappearance. The Indiana Department of Child Services declined to shed any light, saying it does not comment on specific cases.
The Indianapolis Metro Police Department told USA TODAY in a June 9 email that the family had been located in Mexico last month. IMPD said Mexican authorities took the children into custody, but then released them back to Pendley.
Read that again. Seven American children, the youngest barely a toddler, were taken into custody by a foreign government and then handed back to a woman whose own state child welfare agency had flagged her disappearance. And now, weeks later, a body matching Pendley's description has turned up in rural Chiapas, and no one knows where those children are.
IMPD also told USA TODAY that its detectives had not been notified about the death of anyone connected to the case. That disconnect, between a family working with Mexican law enforcement to identify a body and the American police department that opened the missing-persons case, is striking.
Court papers reviewed by USA TODAY show that Pendley and the father of her children, Joseph Butler, had opened paternity cases relating to their children. Lambert described the relationship between Pendley and Butler as a "toxic, on-and-off relationship." Butler could not immediately be reached for comment, USA TODAY reported.
No motive for Pendley's travel to Mexico has been publicly stated. No explanation has emerged for why a mother of seven young children ended up in a remote area of Chiapas, one of Mexico's poorest and most dangerous states. The family has offered no public account of what Pendley was doing there or who she was with.
The list of institutions with a stake in this case is long, and so far, none of them has provided the public with a clear accounting.
The Indiana Department of Child Services knew enough about this family to have a case manager assigned, yet Pendley apparently left the country with all seven children. IMPD learned the family was in Mexico but appears to have had no mechanism to prevent the children from being returned to a situation that was, at minimum, deeply unstable. Mexican authorities briefly intervened, then stepped back. The U.S. State Department has been contacted by USA TODAY for more information, but no response has been reported.
Every one of those agencies exists, in theory, to protect vulnerable people. Seven American children, ages 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 10, and 12, are the most vulnerable people in this story. And right now, no one can say where they are.
The body found near Zinacantán has not been officially identified. The date it was discovered has not been disclosed publicly. The Mexican law enforcement agency working with the family has not been named. The specific timeline of events after Mexican authorities released the children back to Pendley remains a blank.
Those are not minor details. They are the difference between a tragedy and something far worse.
Indianapolis police have asked anyone with information about the missing-persons case to call 317-327-3811.
Seven children are out there somewhere. The systems that were supposed to keep track of them failed at every turn. That is not a bureaucratic footnote, it is the whole point.
