Ida Beard was a helper.
The mother of four loved to volunteer at Sunday school. If anyone needed a hand preparing the fellowship dinner, she always offered her services.
“She wanted to pitch in and do things,” her cousin LaRenda Morgan tells PEOPLE.
Beard, who loved ones described as always having a smile on her face, loved wearing her hair in French braids and had a habit of rolling her pant legs up. She never ventured too far from her El Reno, Okla., home, where she lived with her mother, who is blind.
“She’s just [so] attached to her mother and children,” says Morgan.
So it was a shock when the member of the Cheyenne-Arapaho tribe disappeared on June 30, 2015. On the evening she vanished, she told her mother that she was going to visit friends down the street.
“All we know is she was seen leaving, reportedly walking home, and then she never made it there,” El Reno Police Department Major Kirk Dickerson tells PEOPLE.
What happened to Beard remains a mystery.
Ida Beard.
“More likely than not, somebody somewhere knows something,” says Dickerson. “Until those people come forward and share that information with us, it’s going to continue to be very difficult to find Ida.”
For more information about Ida Beard and other missing Indigenous women cases,subscribe now to PEOPLEor pick up this week’s issue, on newsstands Friday.
Meanwhile, Morgan began pushing for legislation in Oklahoma that would shine a light on missing and murdered Indigenous people.
Earlier this year, Senate bill 172, also known as Ida’s Law, was signed into law. The bill creates an Office of Liaison for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons within the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, which will coordinate with state, tribal and federal law enforcement agencies to address unsolved cases.
Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Sign up forPEOPLE’s free True Crime newsletterfor breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases.
“One of the obstacles solving these cases is the uncertainty about jurisdiction between states, federal and tribal law enforcement,” says Sen. Paul Rosino, who authored the bill. “This misunderstanding over who’s responsible for an investigation can cause so many of these people to fall through the cracks. These families want to know what’s happened to their family members, and we should be doing all we can to try to find them.”
The office will also create a database to track cases and provide guidance to victims' families. “There is some mistrust,” says Rosino. “What we want to do is say, ‘No, listen. We want to help you. We are trying to find your family member.'”
“I told her, ‘I wanted you to know that Ida’s life mattered,'” she says. “Because my aunt felt like nobody cared that Ida was missing.”
The bill, now known as “Ida’s Law,” went into effect on Nov. 1.
“Me and my cousins, after it was all over, we all cried,” says Morgan. “We were like, gosh, Ida would be like, ‘What? Me? I have a law named after me?'”
Anyone with information on Beard’s disappearance is encouraged to call the El Reno Police Department at 405-295-9399.
source: people.com
