Kevin Collins was born on January 24th, 1974 in San Francisco. He was the 7th of 9 children whose family lived in the Western Addition.

On the evening of February 10, 1984 the fourth-grader waited at the bus stop on the corner of Masonic and Oak in Haight Ashbury^[1] to take a bus home after basketball practice at nearby St. Agnes School. He was last seen at around 6:30pm talking to a tall white blond-haired man with a black dog. He was never seen again.

Kevin’s disappearance was before Amber Alerts, and local media and advertisements were the only way to alert the public to a child’s disappearance. Posters with his photo were displayed on telephone poles and storefront windows throughout the City (one of these posters inadvertently appears in the film The Terminator,while another poster appears in a police station scene in the movie Nightmare on Elm Street). Volunteers went door to door. Police searched parks and filmed a public service announcement re-enacting the abduction, using Kevin’s older brother as a stand-in. Kevin’s parents appeared on local newscasts to plead for Kevin’s return.  

Waxed paperboard milk cartons had begun to appear in San Francisco as early as 1906. In 1984 Anderson Erickson Dairy in Des Moines, Iowa began putting photographs of two missing local boys on their milk cartons. Later that year, Kevin became the first to be featured on milk cartons distributed across the nation. By the end of the year the nonprofit, National Child Safety Council^[2], established the Missing Children Milk Carton Program. By 1988 700 of the 1600 independent dairies had adopted the practice, though it faded when the Amber Alert System was created in 1996.

Kevin’s face also appeared on national publications like the cover of Newsweek. His abduction, along with a 1983 movie about the Hollywood, Florida kidnapping and murder of Adam Walsh, spotlighted missing children in the United States.

The family established the Kevin Collins Foundation for Missing Children and manned a 24-hour hotline set up in Collins’ home until 1996.

The strain of Kevin’s disappearance ultimately led to the divorce of his parents. The case was reopened in 2013 with a viable suspect. A search warrant was served on a house on the 1100 block of Masonic, the residence of a convicted pedophile who had died in 2008. While remains were found beneath a concrete floor, they were determined to be that of an animal. That same year, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children^[3] released an age-enhanced image of what Kevin would look like at 39. Kevin Collins has never been found.

Interestingly, when you go onto the California Attorney General’s Office website^[4], it states that Kevin was abducted by two white males driving a four-door royal blue Ford Galaxie. This is in direct conflict with the other information I found in my research.

^[1] Haight-Ashbury: story coming January 14th

^[2] Visit them at www.nationalshildsafetycouncil.org

^[3] Visit them at www.missingkids.org

^[4] Visit them at www.oag.ca.gov