PHOENIX — Wearing a blue shirt and with a smile on his face, Alisa Zoccoli couldn't help but take a picture of her son, James, as they were talking on a video chat. Zoccoli told 12News she remembers how fun it was to see him happy and that she told him she loved him.
Now looking back on that moment, she said she never thought that picture would be the one she had to use to try and find him.
"I would say it's, it very much puts us on edge wondering where he is and wondering if we'll get that knock on the door or that phone call every parent doesn't want to get," she said.
The Zoccolis, who already had three sons, were foster parents to James and his two brothers when they were very young. After a few years, the opportunity came for the Zoccolis to adopt and they jumped at the chance.
"We naturally fell in love with them," Alisa said.
As the boys grew older, James, she said, had some trouble regulating his emotions and began his journey with state-run services to try and help.
"So initially when we started fostering the children, we did play therapy, attachment therapy, we did a lot of behavior therapies and a lot of things like one-on-one," she said. "We started off pretty early getting some services for him that ultimately were not enough."
Several years ago, Zoccoli said they had to ask for a bit more help and put him in state-run therapeutic centers that they thought would give him more resources and better care. However, that never happened.
"I would say over the last four years he has had to live out of home in different placements," she said. "Throughout the last four years many times he's just run and has been out on the streets. So, I would say it's about six months out of the last four years he's been living on the streets. We were told they were secure environments and many times our son would end up back on the streets, he'd be hospitalized for drug and alcohol detox and many times we weren't notified until days later."
Six weeks ago, the 15-year-old ran away from state-run care just eleven days after being transferred to a new center. He hasn't been seen or heard from since.
"So, he went missing around 5:00 p.m. on Sunday Jan. 29," she recalled. "We were notified the next morning. We love our son very much; we want him to be home and it's a really scary thing to know your child is out there on the streets and I feel like nobody is really looking for him."
Zoccoli said the state failed her family 1,000% and worries about the other families in the same situation. She said hearing about the two teenage girls who ran away from a Mesa group home in January only to be found deceased two weeks later adds fuel to the heartache.
"Again, I would say this is a parent's worst nightmare," she said. "And sadly, those two girls didn't have anyone advocating for them and we'd been fighting to get appropriate treatment for our son for years. It's really discouraging that we know that our child needs help and we've been screaming and crying for help and all of our concerns have been dismissed and minimized."
Now Zoccoli, along with other advocates, has had enough and decided to take action. They have recently came up with HB2651, a bill that if passed, would make the Arizona department of child safety move faster when handling the cases of missing children.
"These are youth that have walked out and for many of them, no one is even looking for them," she said. "I would say it's a really enormous problem because I think there's 126 children in DCS Arizona care currently who are missing as runaways. It's like they're an acceptable loss and they're not and if these children could be given support and resources they would have a chance."
There's belief that if the bill would already be in place, Zoccoli's son wouldn't be missing and the two girls out of Mesa would be alive. For now though, Zoccoli said she's left holding onto hope and continues to actively look for son, a job she feels no one else is taking seriously.
"We are always hopeful," she said. "I feel like we need to be realistic about the fact that he does need a lot of ongoing support, but we will never give up hope on our child. Everyday we try to move forward with doing what we can but our life will never be the same without our son, we love him dearly and he's our baby," she said.
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