This week law enforcement from all over the state is meeting in the Fox Cities to learn better ways to handle missing persons cases. A lot of the training has to do with looking past the statistics and into the family’s pain.

In August of 1992, Laurie Depies vanished, and no one knows where she is today. Yet at the time, early on, no one seemed to believe the 21-year-old was taken against her will.

“You still have that myth that the person is of age and a young adult, they have the right to go where they want to, to do what they want to, and they’ll just show up. And that was not just the mentality locally but that’s the national mentality, and still somewhat is,” Jay Breyer, an advocate for missing persons, says.

The FBI says so far this year in Wisconsin alone more than 1,200 people have been reported missing– an overwhelming amount.