Donna Green’s son Raymond was kidnapped from her DeKalb County apartment in 1978 when he was only 5 days old. He’s been missing ever since.
Nearly 50 years have passed, but the loss has not deterred her. Green has shared age-progression portraits with investigators and given them her DNA to aid in their search.
In Raymond’s honor, she founded an organization dedicated to supporting families of missing loved ones, especially those whose cases have gone cold like hers.
“I didn’t get a lot of help when Raymond went missing — not from the police department, not from the community, nowhere. I didn’t want other people to feel like I felt," she told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “It doesn’t matter how long they’ve been missing. We let them know that we really care about, we’re concerned about, their missing loved one.”
That‘s why her partnership with the DeKalb County Cold Case Task Force is so important to her: Families need to know their loved ones have not been forgotten, and that there is still hope, she said.
At community engagements like Saturday’s Missing Persons and DNA Event at Legacy Park, Green can bring families and friends of missing loved ones together with investigators who have the tools and resources to delve into their cases.
“It‘s an opportunity for the community to come out if they want to make a report or seek information on a loved one that is missing, and it‘s an opportunity for us to collect information,” DeKalb County District Attorney Sherry Boston said.
Many are hesitant to trust law enforcement or those working in the justice system, and even fewer are willing to hand over DNA samples, Green said.
But DNA is the best way investigators can track leads in cold cases, hunt down potential connections and identify victims. Otherwise, finding a solution can be like looking for a needle in a haystack, said Beoncia Loveless, the director of operations for the DeKalb County Medical Examiner’s Office.
“We try to do fingerprints, we try to track down family, to get dental records. But the case can go cold very, very quickly,” Loveless said. “If we do not get a hit, then we’re often at a loss for the next steps.”
That‘s where the public comes in. Family members can give DNA samples through a simple cheek swab. Submitting medical records and photos and volunteering DNA from both sides of a family all strengthen the chances of finding new leads.
The more information investigators have, and the more DNA samples available to them in national databases, the more quickly they can narrow the search. DeKalb has 40 active missing person cases and 17 unidentified deceased victims.
Through the cold case task force, the medical examiner’s office has identified 12 victims in the past three years, some of whose cases had been unsolved for decades, Loveless said.
Outreach events like these can break the stigma around DNA by showing the public the process and its usefulness in finding answers, Green said.
“The more the community is getting educated about DNA and what it can do, the more doors are opening and minds are opening” to providing samples, she said.
This is the third year the DA’s office has hosted the event, but it is the first year that it also will include Green’s Walkathon for the Missing and Exploited, which raises money for her nonprofit, Raymond Green International Outreach of Hope.
Green said her infant son was taken from her apartment by a woman named Lisa, a stranger who she had befriended at the hospital days prior. Police have admitted the case file was lost many years ago, the AJC previously reported.
The GBI’s sketch artist has developed age-progression portraits to show what Raymond might look like as an adult, and potential leads from around the world have come in through the years, but none helped solve the mystery.
Green still holds out hope that even decades later she will find him, likely through DNA testing.
Each year, more and more people have attended DeKalb’s DNA events, including medical examiners in other metro Atlanta counties, the GBI and FBI, and genealogy experts, Boston said.
The work of the cold case task force has also helped her office bring closure and justice for victims and their families, Boston said, including the father of William DaShawn Hamilton, whose case drew national attention.
More than 20 years after a 6-year-old boy’s body was discovered near a DeKalb cemetery, he was identified through artist renderings and DNA sampling as Hamilton. In 2024, his mother was found guilty of concealing the child’s death but was acquitted of murder.
Technological advancements have improved investigators’ ability to solve cold cases, but the work comes at a high cost. The DeKalb task force relies on federal grant funding that expires later this year.
Boston said she is fearful the grant might not be renewed.
“This is an example of innovative, important work that we could not complete without those federal dollars,” Boston said. “It means holding violent offenders accountable, and it means getting justice for families that have been waiting decades for this opportunity.”
To learn more about the task force’s work and how to help investigators find or identify lost loved ones at Saturday’s event, go to https://bit.ly/ColdCaseEvents.
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