Man with Down syndrome, missing for a week, found in locked Metro corridor

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For six days, Jimmy Hall and his family searched desperately for his missing son — a 31-year-old man with Down syndrome who’d slipped away from his caregiver on Oct. 20 in Maryland and boarded a bus. “Shawnyboy!” they called out day after day, often until 3 a.m. “Shawnyboy!” Fast, informative and written just for locals. Get The 7 DMV newsletter in your inbox every weekday morning. ArrowRight Hall suppressed his darkest worries. But as he knew, Shawnyboy wasn’t warmly dressed, could only string one or two words together and wouldn’t know how to ask strangers for food and water.

Late Thursday, as Hall and 10 family members were out again, canvassing a parking lot in Glenmont, his phone rang. It was one of the Montgomery County detectives leading the police search.

Hall raced over to a nearby train station and hugged his son, who greeted him the same way as always.

The police department’s search for his son — real name Rashawn Williams — got off to an inadequately slow start, according to Hall, family members and other citizens who searched for Williams. They allege the search didn’t gain the appropriate urgency until Monday night, three days after his disappearance.

Then, three days after that, an officer looking for Williams at the Glenmont Metro station spotted an emergency exit. A station manager led him into a corridor behind it.

And there he found Williams, alive and in remarkably good health. Police believe that after he got inside, the door locked behind him. He then made his way down the corridor and through another door into a small room, where he apparently stayed rather than ascend a steep set of interior stairs.

Williams was taken to Holy Cross Hospital and treated over several hours for dehydration.

“The doctors — they said he’s just as healthy as a horse,” said his aunt Ajanai Hall.

Over the next day, she and her brother said, Williams was all smiles — happy to see familiar faces rather than closed-off walls. “He’s an angel,” Jimmy Hall said. “He loves to eat, he loves music, he loves to dance. He’s an absolute angel.”

For the first 20 years of his life, according to Hall, Williams’s mother cared for him. When she died, Hall, who had to keep working, moved him into a group home during the week and his home on weekends. About a year ago, Hall said, a fire at the group home prompted the agency caring for him to relocate him and others to suites inside a Residence Inn on the eastern edge of Montgomery County.

Williams was there last Friday night, Hall said, when he walked past the front desk and boarded the R2 bus, whose route stretches 10 miles through Montgomery and Prince George’s counties, ending at the Fort Totten Metro station in D.C.

In an interview Friday, Montgomery County Assistant Police Chief Nicholas Augustine said police were called by the caregiving agency at 6:41 p.m. on the day of his disappearance, with the first officers arriving 14 minutes later. They were told Williams had been spotted boarding the bus.

Augustine said the department was aware of concerns about the police response in the opening days. “We will do a debrief and see what could have been done better,” he said.

But based on his initial review, Augustine said, “For the information we had on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, I feel we did everything we could have done.”

He said police were challenged by the cross-jurisdictional issues of four different police agencies: Montgomery County, Metro Transit, Prince George’s County and D.C.'s Metropolitan Police Department.

The responding officers requested a description of Williams be sent to the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, which operates both bus lines and the Metro train system, Augustine said. Officers also issued a notification to area agencies to be on the lookout for Williams and sent a similar notice to a Maryland law enforcement clearinghouse for information-sharing.

Montgomery County police also shared a missing person flier of Williams on social media and emailed it to area news outlets. It included a picture and description of Williams but didn’t state Williams had Down syndrome and was vulnerable.

Augustine said officers did not try to stop the R2 bus because by the time they arrived, they didn’t know which R2 bus he was on or whether he was still on it.

Jimmy Hall, who lives in Montgomery Village, said he was called to the hotel and his family began frantically searching on its own. He drove along the R2 route, calling out his son’s name. At one point, he flagged down a police officer in Prince George’s County to check on any ongoing searches. The officer said he didn’t know Williams was missing, Hall said.

Augustine said that because Williams appeared comfortable getting on public transportation, officers on early Saturday morning checked nearby Metro train stations. But they had no real starting place for a search, he said, given that Williams was last seen on a moving bus that covered such a long route.

The search was made harder, he said, because Williams wasn’t leaving electronic markers behind — no mobile phone, no credit card purchases. “Since there were no trackable items, there wasn’t much the detective was able to do,” Augustine said.

So the department focused on getting word out to the public and notifying its officers and area law enforcement agencies. “From a law-enforcement perspective, we did everything that first night to find him if an officer had come upon him,” Augustine said.

To Hall and his family, it was all too passive. They remain frustrated that police seemed difficult to reach in the opening days and slow to scour surveillance footage. It was not until Monday or Tuesday, they said, that an investigator spotted him on Metro camera footage walking through the Glenmont station.

Investigators determined that Williams likely took the R2 bus to the end of the line, got off at Fort Totten, and rode the Red Line for more than three hours until the train stopped for the evening — at Glenmont.

“The first few days of their search were terrible,” Ajanai Hall said.

She said Tuesday marked the start of intense searching from law enforcement, with more detectives and searchers assigned and eventually helicopters overhead. It culminated Thursday evening when Officer Johnathan Greene, a search specialist, wanted to make another pass through the Glenmont station. Working with a station manager, he came across the emergency exit corridor and decided to look inside, officials said.

It was unclear how extensively the station had been searched over the preceding days and whether the corridor had been searched. In a statement Friday, a Metro spokeswoman said Glenmont station staffers had helped the officer “locate Rashawn in the back of an emergency exit corridor that is not visible from the platform or station manager kiosk. We are relieved that Rashawn was found in good health and reunited with his family. That’s the outcome everyone was hoping for.”

Williams’s family said they tried to get a missing person alert issued for him but learned that Maryland rules meant he was too old for an Amber Alert (for child abductions) and too young for a Silver Alert (for people 60 or over) — a gap they said needs addressing for particularly vulnerable people.

Ajanai Hall said that as much as she dislikes thinking about her nephew stuck in that tight space for up to six days — cold, thirsty, hungry and likely scared — she was happy he wasn’t wandering the streets. “There are cruel people out there, and they can be really cruel to someone like Shawnyboy,” she said.

After his release from the hospital — and a lot of eating, drinking water and bathing — he was right back to his old happy self.

“I don’t consider myself lucky,” Jimmy Hall said. “I consider myself blessed.”