Jaliek Rainwalker: adoptive grandmother continues to search for answers
Jaliek Rainwalker was 12 years-old when he disappeared on Nov. 1, 2007.
He was last seen with his adoptive father Stephen Kerr, who initially claimed the pre-teen ran away from the Kerr family’s vacant Greenwich home.
Despite countless leads, Jaliek has never been found, something that haunts his adoptive grandmother Barbara Reeley everyday.
Reeley has since moved to Florida, but lived 40 miles away from her daughter Jocelyn but saw her grandchildren several times a week and held ‘granny camp’ for two weeks in the summer at her house.
Kerr was named a person of interest by police in 2017, but no arrests in the boy’s disappearance have ever been made.
It was July 2002, when Jaliek came to Stephen Kerr and Jocelyn McDonald joining their three biological sons and an adoptive daughter. The couple, Jaliek’s 7th set of foster parents, moved to adopt him just two years later.
Things were good in the Kerr/McDonald house, until they weren’t anymore- according to Barbara Reeley- McDonald’s mother.
Barbara recalls a time she pulled up to the home and heard yelling from outside. She says she walked in to see Jaliek flailing his arms around, but he ran to her and just hugged her. She explained that Jaliek would become extremely frustrated if he couldn’t do something such as button a shirt or complete a homework assignment.
A little over a month before Jaliek’s disappearance the family attempted to revoke or reverse the adoption, Barbara citing Jaliek’s size as he approached adolescence and his existing emotional conditions- including Reactive attachment disorder or RAD.
The courts explained that the complicated process should be a last resort, instead suggesting the family seek out respite care for Jaliek.
That’s where he was, with his former foster mother, Elaine Persons, when Stephen picked him up Nov. 1. They were last seen at the Latham Red Robin location.
Dr. Tina Lane, who runs the Criminal Investigation Resource Center at Russell Sage, is from Washington County and knows a whole community still searching for the young boy.
Though suspicions have surrounded the boy’s adoptive father for years, police are hesitant to try the case without a body, according to retired State Police Investigator, Tom Aiken.
Investigator Aiken says a special prosecutor with experience in cases with no body needs to be brought in in order to “do it right.”
Both Barbara and investigator Aiken shared the findings from the National Center for Missing and Exploited children in Washington D.C.
Aiken says after 16 and a half years, time is now their enemy. Saying there is nothing to lose by taking a shot at it now.
Jaliek’s grandmother says former Post-Star reporter Don Lehman is the expert on the case.
Lehman remembers the intense searches in the weeks following Jaliek’s disappearance and an early encounter with the person of interest himself- Stephen Kerr.
Barbara Reeley has never given up searching for Jaliek, to no end, even at the cost of losing contact with her daughter and her biological grandchildren.
