Man claims to be missing child who allegedly disappeared from a Michigan Mall in 1994
April 02, 2022
On the afternoon of December 12th, 1994, Dwanna Jackson, a mother residing in Michigan, reported her 4-year-old child missing from the Wonderland Mall in Livonia. She claimed that the two had been on a shopping trip when the toddler wandered down a hallway near a Target store and vanished off the face of the earth.
Dwanna quickly alerted an 18 year old mall security guard named Randy, who would go on to take a big interest in the case and eventually host a website dedicated to finding the missing 4-year-old. “She was believable” he said in an interview with a local radio station, “and genuine” he added. Despite being a Sunday the mall was busy, likely due to the fact that it was just 2 weeks before Christmas, Randy assumed that the child had wandered off to look at toys, and would eventually resurface like the dozens of kids that wandered off each day, however D’Wan never did.
He immediately searched the KB Toy store and nearby arcade- a location many of the missing children were found in regularly, but D’Wan was not there.
When the police appealed for information pertaining to the missing child, no eyewitnesses came forward, leading the authorities and those following the case, to question if D’Wan was ever in the mall to begin with. The last recorded sighting of the child was earlier that morning at a laundromat.
Dwanna told the mall security and police that her child had went missing around 2:30 PM, but eyewitnesses reported seeing her enter the mall through the car park at around 3:30 PM that afternoon, an hour after he claimed D’Wan went missing.
According to Randy, there were no exterior cameras installed at the mall at the time and the tapes never showed Dwanna enter Wonderland mall, nor did any of the tapes show her and her son together, only her alone. D’Wan’s grandmother, who worked at a Footlocker store in Wonderland Mall told reporters that her daughter would never harm her own son.
“There’s no way my child would hurt her child” she told the local media.
During an interview with the police, Mrs. Jackson, Nee Harris, claimed that she recognized both herself and her son on the CCTV footage, however it would later be confirmed that she was pointing out strangers clad in completely different outfits to the one she was wearing that day.
The police found it suspicious that she would claim strangers wearing completely different clothes were her and her son if she clearly knew they were not.When they pointed it out to her Dwanna simply replied with answers such as “Oh yeah, I guess it’s not me”.
Suspicious, the local police subjected the missing child’s mother to polygraph tests, both of which she failed. She submitted to the first test one day after her child went missing, after a sleepless night, a fact that her own mother, who was quite vocal during the investigation, rightly pointed out was unfair. “I think they took it at a bad time” she said.
Dwanna went on to fail a second polygraph, however she remained staunch in her position that she did not harm her son in any way, a sentiment that her immediate family and the father of her child supported when interviewed by the media.
Still, the fact that no cameras had captured Dwanna and D’Wan enter the mall together that day made those following and investigating the case wonder if D’Wan was even at Wonderland Mall that day, and the fact that she had tried to pass off strangers as mother and son perplexed police. Although Dwanna was a suspect in the case she was never charged with having an involvement in her sons disappearance.
“I want to find my son” the child’s father told local news reporters. “I want to see him, I love him, I just want to hold him."
A background check into Dwanna Jackson revealed that she had a record of welfare fraud based in Detroit.
The case of the child’s mysterious disappearance remained cold for decades until a man recently reached out to his mother via Facebook claiming to be her missing child. The man, who is 25 years old, or believes he is 25 years old, contacted the local police in early December to voice his concerns and asked them to keep the matter private. The local police were later perplexed to see that he had been publicly posting about the process on his Facebook profile. He had requested to be DNA tested and reportedly reached out to Dwanna Harris via Facebook, but she allegedly blocked him after he could not provide information that would confirm his identity as D’Wan, such as the locations of various birthmarks on his body.
The individual has provided DNA samples to the police and is awaiting the results.
Those with any information retaining to D’Wan’s disappearance are encouraged to reach out to the Livonia police department missing people unit on 734-421-2900.
