THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, April 19, 1995 TAG: 9504190031
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ELIZABETH SIMPSON, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 173 lines
ARON SILVERMAN was just the sort of kid you'd expect to disappear for a few days.
A 17-year-old from Norfolk, he had a wild mane of blond hair and ran with a rough crowd. He was a high-school dropout. He used drugs and had fights with his dad over money.
For all those reasons, his parents didn't even report him missing for a couple of weeks when he disappeared in June 1993. Ron and Debbie Silverman can't tell you the exact day he didn't come home.
But that day - whenever it was - turned into weeks, then into months. Now it's been nearly two years. The Silvermans are still waiting for Aron.
In that time, they've stopped thinking of Aron as a runaway. Now they dwell on evidence he's not.
He didn't take anything with him. No jeans, no underwear, no toothbrush. Not his beloved guitar, nor his favorite fishing rod. He didn't tell anyone he was leaving. Not his best friend, Shawn Gwinn; not his brother, Drew, with whom he'd used to party; nor his sister, Naomi, who'd spent many afternoons fishing with Aron.
And, as far as his family knows, he hasn't talked with anyone in those circles since. ``We were close friends, best friends. Buddies,'' says Drew. ``That's why I can't understand it.''
Today - two Christmases, two birthdays, countless family reunions, fishing trips, parties and jam sessions since that day in June - Aron's disappearance doesn't add up to the people who knew him best.
Ron Silverman, a long-haired, laid-back kind of guy, sits in an easy chair in his Norfolk home and looks out the front door.
``I keep picturing him walking up that driveway,'' he muses. ``I look for him every day to walk in that door.''
He has seen his son's face in the window pane of his front door a million times - and never.
It's true that Aron fits the profile of a runaway. He was a teenager when he disappeared. His parents were separated. He was having girl and money problems. And he'd recently had an argument with his father.
But in one excruciating way, his case is different.
He didn't come home. About half of runaways come home within two days; nearly 90 percent come home within a couple of months.
Only in a small number of cases, about 10 percent nationally, even fewer locally, do teens stay away longer than six months. In Norfolk, Aron is the only long-term runaway case on file.
Ben Ermini, who manages missing-person cases at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in Arlington County, says that kind of time lapse weighs heavily on the psyche of a parent.
``They go through an awful lot of hell,'' says Ermini, who manages Aron's case. ``You'll often hear them say, `If I only knew the outcome. . . . ' The hardest is not knowing. Not knowing whether they're in trouble, deceased. It becomes a living hell.''
A gathering at the house of one of Aron's friends in late June 1993 could have been just another hazy memory, another party at a house famous for them. But now it stands out as the last time Aron's circle of friends and family saw him.
They only remember a few details about that night. Aron was drunk, like a lot of others there. He was with a girl who was a free-lance go-go dancer in Newport News. And he was wearing a coral necklace she had given him.
``He told the girl we had a boat, and that he could take her out,'' Drew says.
Aron and the girl left the party together.
When Aron didn't show up at home the next day, no one thought anything about it. Everyone figured he'd spent the night with the girl or crashed with friends. It wasn't unusual for him to be gone for days at a time.
But when more than a week had passed, Ron Silverman looked at Drew and said, ``Something's wrong.''
They called Debbie Silverman, Aron's mother. She hadn't seen him either.
Ron reported Aron missing to the Norfolk police. Since there was no evidence of foul play, he was listed as a runaway.
During those first few weeks, neither parent was too worried.
``I figured he'd show up,'' says Debbie, a part-time landscaper, who's now divorced from Aron's father. ``Then, as time went on, I thought maybe he ran off with a group of friends to do something wild, like follow The Grateful Dead around. That's just the kind of thing Aron would do.''
But time went on and on and on, and soon concern turned to worry and to fear.
Both parents set about trying to find Aron. Ron had quit his work as a carpenter a few years earlier because of a heart transplant, so he had time to do his own investigation.
He knew Aron had been last seen with a go-go dancer from Newport News. So he went from one Peninsula bar to another looking for the girl.
Someone knew of a girl who had a blond boyfriend. Ron searched through the trailer park where she supposedly lived, looking for a red Trans-Am, the car he was told she drove.
Ron never found her or the red Trans-Am or Aron. He felt like he was chasing shadows.
He also contacted the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. They put Aron on a missing-person poster, distributed it across the country and mailed the Silvermans a stack.
Both Silvermans stuck the posters up everywhere they thought Aron might be. Fishing haunts in Willoughby. Convenience stores in Ocean View. Festivals that he used to attend with friends. Debbie sent fliers to truck stops in San Diego after a psychic told her Aron was living in Southern California.
Both parents have had good times and bad. Times when they resurrect their search, and times when they give up and cry.
``There used to be more ups than downs,'' Ron says. ``Now there are more downs than ups.''
Debbie remembers periods when she'd sit down at the kitchen table after her daughter, Naomi, had left for school in the morning and cry over a cup of coffee.
``You worry,'' she says, her voice gravelly from smoking. ``You go through periods thinking he couldn't be alive. It's a little something that's always there. But you go on. You can't walk around in despair. Naomi needs a mother.''
She keeps a cardboard box with Aron's things. There's a tumbled mound of his clothes, some gifts she bought when she was convinced he'd show up on Christmas Day, some family mementos. There's even a T-shirt she bought on a family vacation, not wanting to leave him out.
``When he comes back it'll be here for him,'' says Debbie, carefully packing everything back in the box.
Aron's 18th birthday more than a year ago marked an important milestone.
It meant he was legally an adult, a time many runaways touch base with their parents because they know they're under no legal obligation to return.
``The usual kid will turn up sooner or later,'' says Norfolk Detective Rebecca Beacham, the youth services detective in charge of the case. ``They'll get caught shoplifting, or they'll call from a friend's house. For him to disappear and not call even after he turned 18 is very rare. That began to worry us.''
Ermini, of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, says cases of children never returning home usually fall into a couple of categories.
Sometimes they are children who have been abused, who want to cut all ties with their families. But Aron's closest friend says he doesn't think Aron falls into that group. ``He was never beat. He had an argument here and there and that was it.''
Naomi, says her brother had differences while living with both parents. Aron and her father fought a lot over money. Naomi says she can understand why he might leave, but not why he wouldn't call.
In some other runaway cases, teenagers go off and start a new life and never look back. This is the scenario that Aron's family hopes is true.
``I keep imagining him living in a big house somewhere with a wife and kids,'' Naomi says.
And sometimes teenagers don't come home because they've run into some kind of trouble; sometimes they've even been killed.
Aron's 18th birthday meant more than his becoming an adult. Because he's no longer considered a runaway, it meant his name would be removed from the National Crime Information Center - a computer database that police departments tap into across the country.
So if something happens to him wherever he is - a traffic violation, a car accident, a stabbing - his name won't register as a runaway.
Some cities change the status of runaways to ``missing'' when they turn 18 and leave them in the computer database. But in Norfolk there must be some evidence that the adult is in danger to do that.
The twisted feeling in the stomachs of Aron's parents doesn't qualify.
Aron's father, mother, siblings and friends have all caught glimpses of Aron. But it's never him. They've turned around in traffic. Run back through a crowd. Scanned the faces on news programs about Woodstock reunions, Grateful Dead concerts and summer festivals.
``I can't accept that he's alive, and I can't accept that he's dead,'' Ron says. ``It's like he's missing in action. We can't even grieve over him.''
Life goes on without him. His grandfather has died. He's got a new cousin. His parents' divorce has become final. He's about to become an uncle. His friends have grown up, and they've had children of their own.
Yet Aron stays the same in the minds of his friends and family. They'd like to know the 19-year-old they hope he's become.
``If he's dead, someone knows what happened,'' Debbie says. ``And if he's alive, someone knows where he is.'' ILLUSTRATION: BILL TIERNAN/Staff color photos
Aron's father, Ron Silverman, holds his son's guitar in front of
their Norfolk home.
KEYWORDS: MISSING CHILDREN by CNB