(NewsNation) — For more than a year, one family has been hitting the streets to search for a young mother who went missing, leaving her baby girl behind.
Ruthey Smith was last seen in a neighborhood south of Los Angeles, in an area known for prostitution. Her family acknowledges the 20-year-old has been working as a prostitute for quite some time, largely in an effort to support her baby daughter.
That little girl is a key reason family members insist Smith did not disappear by choice.
The 2-year-old loves the shore, a natural fit for the energetic little girl named Ocean. It’s also a favorite place for her mother, who spent a lot of time there while growing up in Long Beach, California. When pregnant with Ocean, Smith came to the beach for a photoshoot.
But Ocean has now spent nearly half of her short life being raised by her grandmother, Kathryn Renesto. She said she’s constantly wondering if she’s making the decisions her daughter would have made.
”It makes it hard because I feel like I’m messing up in every little way or any little thing that’s wrong,” Renesto said.
Smith was just 19 when she went missing on Mar. 2, 2022. Renesto was the one who tracked down the last known video of her daughter, who was working as a prostitute.
”She didn’t want to do that. And she tried and tried and tried but it’s easier said than done. But it wasn’t enough and I didn’t do enough,” Renesto said.
Smith would work at the intersection of 70th and Figueroa, an LA neighborhood well-known for sex work at all hours of the day.
While filming, the NewsNation crew was threatened with robbery.
Smith’s aunt, Amanda Lourenco, said she had a feeling something bad was going to happen to her niece.
“Right before she went missing. I was telling her something bad’s gonna happen. I just felt it. She probably felt it, too,” Lourenco said.
Lourenco was more like a sister to Smith than an aunt, due to the closeness of their ages. She said Smith had been abducted from the streets before.
“Well, she was taken before by pimps. So my sister had to go all the way to Vegas and get her one time before,” Lourenco said. “But that time she was able to use a phone, and that’s how we knew where she was.”
This time, though, the family has had no contact from Smith.
At one point, Lourenco found an image of a woman that she is convinced is her niece in advertising for a so-called “Gentleman’s Club” in Nevada. She convinced officers in Elko, Nevada to investigate, but Smith was not found.
Private investigator Moses Castillo has been working with the family to try to find Smith.
”The slim hope that we do have that she’s still alive is that apparently she’s been spotted in some brothels in Nevada, where her image has been posted on the website, as an individual that’s available for services, if you will,” Castillo said.
But the family’s hopes that Smith would be found, as she was before in Las Vegas, have begun to fade.
“Most of these girls do because they don’t have a choice. Like, they’re in poverty. She’s a young mom, she had a child to look after. And she wanted to live on her own,” Lourenco said.
Smith’s family said they’ve been fighting hard to convince police that Smith, the kind of devoted mother who celebrated her baby’s half-birthday and threw an elaborate first birthday party, would never leave her daughter for so long voluntarily.
Smith turned 20 and was gone for more than a year before Renesto was asked to provide DNA samples from herself and Ocean.
“The lady that was able to take the DNA, she was able to make sure that she’s on certain lists, which really made me feel good, because I was under the impression she was already on these lists,” Renesto said.
Those lists include a federal database called NamUS, which uses DNA from families to help coroners identify John and Jane Does. It’s a resource families of missing people often need to push for
Castillo advises families to keep pushing law enforcement until their loved one is entered into the database.
“Please, reach out to your detectives. Don’t take no for an answer. Go there and be persistent until someone collects your DNA reference sample,” he said.
Meanwhile, little Ocean has been growing and making new discoveries. But her grandmother struggles to create happy childhood memories while still missing her own daughter.
“I just want her to come home. Like, I want her alive. Like I want her to be able to live her life as a young 20-year-old girl and not be held against her will or whatever the situation is,” Renesto said. “But I just know that she’s gone. And we don’t know where she’s at. It’s been 461 days. How many more days does it have to be?”