Missing In Alabama: Kimberly Arrington vanished while walking to the store for candy and a soda in 1998

Fight, flight, or freeze are all normal responses. Thank goodness you were able to overcome the freeze enough to escape!

I'm so sorry.

Something similar happened to me. I'm a shorter guy and was forced into a van on a busy area in town outside some busy restaurants and bars merely 20 feet from my friends. I barely made a peep and squirmed away. When I walked back over to my friends after escaping they had no idea anything even happened.

When I was 20 I was carjacked in broad daylight at a busy gas station in an affluent neighborhood and nobody noticed anything. -$280 and my sense of safety, they let me go.

Good point. What happened to you was shock and fear. You just don't know how to react at first. You just made me recall a memory when I was quite a small and young child (probably around 8 years old) when one guy in the back side of a van gave me a cornichon. I think there were plenty of people in the area, so mostlikely didn't expect anything fishy, but still it wasn't the right thing to do, as I am sure that he could have kidnapped me or at least poisoned me if he wanted to. But in the end it seems like he just wanted to make a nice gesture.

I was certain I would make a huge scene and fight them off. I didn't, I was pretty much silent

I'm so glad you were able to escape! I get what you mean about being silent -- I was on a train pre-covid when I woke up late at night, to see a man on top of a struggling girl in the seats next to me. I struggled to my feet, and the guy stood up and started walking towards me. He was in between me and the exit to the next carriage, where the train crew was. I still don't know why I didn't scream and wake up the other passengers in the carriage (it was coach-class without separate compartments). All that eventually came out was a meek little whimper -- "can I help you?"

I'm a grown woman, but the only thing in my mind was the fear that if I woke people up, they would be angry with me and I'd be punished. (What u/ooken mentioned earlier.)

I’m so sorry that happened to you and I’m glad you’re okay. I would probably react the same way, when I panic or get scared I never scream, I just freeze.

I was also nearly taken as well. It was a main road in a nice suburb. I was 15 and was waiting for a bus at a bus stop. He pulled in and asked me if i needed a ride…I froze and stepped back to the bus shelter and he drove off. At the time i knew it was wrong because i felt scared but i don’t think i told my parents. Im much older now and shudder to think what could have happened.

There's a tendency to hold your breath and to make yourself smaller when under this sort of threat. These are things that have to be trained out of people.

Similar thing happened to me when I was 20. Guy probably thought I was younger since I was really small back then but it is a possibility

They also usually had security cameras then, all over the store. That's how I got grounded for the summer for stealing hair scrunchies from a CVS as a kid. 😑

I got those same feels. Her poor family - I hope they get closure one day.

Kiwi is the cutest nickname 😭

What a great response from the butcher though.

I was 16 and into computers in 1998. Very relatable on multiple levels.

Cops don’t like to believe people. Especially not young girls. I swear.

Yeah, that bugs me too. It just seems so dismissive.

Good point. She probably wouldn't have told her mom she was going out, either.

Less work. Less scrutiny.

They do that with practically every child/teen that disappears. It's infuriating.

I do think it's odd that her sister doesn't remember why she didn't join. Surely she would have immediately rethought their last interaction when her sister went missing and immediately committed that to permanent memory? I wonder if it's possible if sister knows more than she is letting on, such as a secret boyfriend kinda thing.

If you were trying to help your sis sneak out, pretending you were asked to join her but don't want to go this time is a pretty common tactic.

She’s black and Sally cops don’t care about black kids who go missing

I'm not here to disagree with your overall statement, but going back to the write-up:

"Even when she was temporarily classified as a runaway due to her age, the family maintained she had never runaway and had no reason to."

This just means she was "temporarily" classified as a runaway. Temporarily can mean anything (first 48 hours?). A 16 yo teenager could be reasonably classified as such because, by that age, they would be able to voluntarily leave their home for whatever reason.

"It seems local authorities investigated by conducting dozen of interviews with family, friends and classmates. They also investigated local known sex offenders and questioned some. But because of her age they didn't suspect a child predator necessarily would have risked abducting an older aged child who could fight back."

Basically what this says to me is that the police indeed dedicated many men-hours to knock on people's doors, cross every T and dot every I. The conclusion is that the police didn't suspect a child predator, probably because a pedophile after 3 year old girls are statistically unlike to target post-pubescent victims. For all we know, they could have been looking into "sex offenders" that better fit this profile.

I also lived in Montgomery at the time and didn’t hear about this case. It’s very disconcerting that it wasn’t made a bigger story. My brother graduated from that high school two years earlier, and we still didn’t hear of it through common conversation. So sad that her mother died not knowing what happened to her.

Ehhh, in 98, if there were cameras, they would have been extremely low-quality, more like stop motion, grainy video. I would be more surprised if there were cameras than not. They were expensive, all VHS, and if the cops didn't request them for a few days, often recorded over pretty frequently.

The receipt system would have been even worse. Debit cards were still pretty uncommon at the point. (I had my first one around 2001 or so, and a lot of places didn't take them.) So most places were cash, check, or credit card only. She'd have paid cash for one. For two, register systems were still pretty basic. If they had a manual backup, it would have been just a roll of register tape duplicated in the register with a list of transactions and dollar amounts, one after the other. If they'd shifted to electric journals by then, it would have been the same only on a back office computer with a search function.

But no phone numbers collected, no clue which $2 transaction was hers. Cashier might not have remembered a random teenager buying a soda.

Yup I did a Google search and directions search on maps for this a few years ago. It's scary the possibilities for this case.

Based on the little that's known publicly it sounds plausible.

Her dad referred to her as a "good girl" and in an article from 2015 her younger sister (14 when Kimberly disappeared) said her sister wasn't involved with an older man. But we should take both with a grain of salt.

The CNN article from 2010 said that she enjoyed learning computers at school. That's pretty ambiguous and could mean anything from learning how to use Microsoft Word to a Pascal programming class to browsing the Internet. The "at school" doesn't mean the household didn't have a computer or she didn't have access to one at a friend's home or a library. And a dad doesn't always know what his 16-year-old daughter is up to and it's common for parents to publicly describe their missing children in a favorable light.

"wasn't involved with an older man" doesn't mean she wasn't involved with a teen or someone pretending online to be a teen. We have to be careful not to read too much into what's said in articles, especially when what's stated aren't direct quotes, because we don't know what the journalist asked nor what was actually said.

Hopefully detectives explored any possible online interactions she may have had. Schools 26 years ago didn't always keep extensive logs of website activity nor accurately track which students were using the computers so that may or may not have been helpful. If not, interviewing her friends may have revealed something.

I don't believe so. If she left for a premeditated encounter, she would do it under different circumstances and not one that could involve her sister tagging along.

I mean, could be as simple as holding a gun or knife to her and saying “Don’t make a sound or I’ll kill you.”

Yep. I doubt the cops are looking into it.

I don't know about Unsolved Mysteries but it did feature on Maury Povich, and Nancy Grace.

I read that she was sick before she passed...but not sure what her actual diagnosis was.