Avery Bernard Johns, a junior at Howard University, took matters into her own hands after realizing how often reports of missing Black women in Washington, D.C. go unnoticed by mainstream media and law enforcement. The result? Deadlining—a first-of-its-kind database designed to track reports of missing and murdered Black women in the nation’s capital, ensuring victims are never forgotten.
Black women make up approximately 7% of the U.S. population, but are the victims of 20% of all missing person cases each year, according to Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Additionally, studies prove that missing Black women and girls frequently “receive less media coverage and delayed or biased law enforcement responses compared to white victims,” and are often mischaracterized as runaways rather than endangered persons, per The Hill. Now, an HBCU student is doing something to change those staggering statistics.
Avery Bernard Johns presented her research project on Oct. 1 at the University of New Hampshire during the Justice Studies Fall 2026 Colloquium, according to The New Hampshire. The presentation examined historical redlining—a discriminatory practice that limited investment and access to housing in designated neighborhoods primarily occupied by people of color and the disturbing patterns of violence and disappearances among Black women and girls that don’t receive the same sense of urgency or care from authorities.
The double major with minors in data science and criminology explained that the inspiration behind Deadlining came from the practice of redlining and the case of the disappearance of six-year-old Hattie Yvonne Jackson. Hattie was last seen with her 10-year-old brother near a picnic area at Rock Creek Park in Washington, D.C., in July 1961. According to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, an “unknown white male in his 30s was in the area watching the children during the time of the abduction.”
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More than six decades later, Hattie is still missing, and information about her disappearance was difficult to find. Bernard Johns’ research led to the development of Deadlining, a public case database that documents missing and murdered Black women and girls in Washington, D.C., from 1961 through 2025.
“As our girls continue to go missing, what specific measures is the Metropolitan Police Department taking to identify patterns, alert the public, and protect Black women and girls throughout the District?,” the website asks alongside bold text, “HAVE YOU SEEN ME?”
“If the dataset didn’t exist, I needed to answer that question. And I realized I was going to have to build it myself,” Bernard Johns recalled, The New Hampshire reported. “This could just be publicly available information, but no one in the government is doing it,” Bernard Johns added, per the Howard University News Service. “I knew that I could do it, so I taught myself how to code.”
To build Deadlining, Bernard Johns first identified cases, confirmed locations, and gathered information across numerous sources to create the database that organizes missing persons’ information. Working alongside the Metropolitan Police Department’s Victim Services Division gave Bernard Johns firsthand insight into how difficult it is to access and organize crucial investigative data—including several historical case records that had been discarded altogether.
Bernard Johns expressed plans to expand Deadlining outside of D.C. to a national level, providing an interactive map and geospatial analysis that not even the D.C. Missing Persons website—the official portal for reporting and tracking missing individuals in the District of Columbia—offers.
Ultimately, Bernard Johns wants her database to influence public policy and law enforcement efforts to improve how authorities document cases. “My work started off rooted around the Howard community because I recognized there was a specific problem in D.C.,” Bernard Johns said. “But there’s a problem everywhere.”
She added: “If I have the right to be alive, I want to use my vitality to help these women.”
