Kara Berg

The Indianapolis Star

INDIANAPOLIS — When Patrice Wise's son was found dead, she didn’t know how to move on.

The Arlington, Ind., woman remembers the sleepless nights her and her fiancé spent searching for her son, Dakota Stump, who was a soldier on an Army base in Fort Hood when he disappeared. When his body was found in a wooded area, around 100 yards from the road at the base, the days and nights dragged on.

“I’ve tried so many things to keep myself busy and not constantly be reminded of what happened,” Wise said. “It helps, but I don’t think a mother ever gets over losing a child.

“I feel like every day that goes by, it almost gets worse."

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Stump's body was discovered next to his flipped-over vehicle by soldiers conducting land-navigation training. He was only 32 pounds when he was found after a month, Wise said. Investigators believe the vehicle left the road, entered the wooded area and rolled over multiple times. The terrain hid the vehicle from the road.

The pain from Stump's death led Wise to take action. She working on passing Dakota's Law, which aims to change how law enforcement and military handle situations when veterans and active duty members go missing, making it easier to locate them.

Wise wants the military to open lines of communication to family, get rid of restrictions for times to file a missing persons report, make video surveillance available to investigators immediately, track bank account activity with no warrant or paperwork, dispatch search and rescue units sooner, investigate before filing an AWOL status and create a "Warrier alert," similar to an Amber alert.

But most of all, she wants military officials and police to make every effort to find a missing person as soon as possible.

Right now, when a soldier goes missing, the army conducts an inquiry to see where they may be, notifies the provost marshal within 24 hours, reports the soldier absent within 48 hours and notifies the next of kin if the soldier is still missing after 10 days.

But Wise thinks that's too long.

“Right now, there’s no set in stone procedure for when a soldier is AWOL or doesn’t show up,” Wise said. “If there’s a set in stone procedure, then soldiers are going to get found.”

Wise wants to make sure other parents don’t have to go through the same thing she did during the month Stump was missing. She believes if police found Stump earlier, he would still be alive.

To a lot of people, AWOL just means that a solider didn't show up their post because they were goofing around, left to visit their family, or they didn't want to be in the military anymore, Wise said. But she wants to make people aware that going AWOL can mean anything. The solider can be injured or dead, or they could have deserted the army.

"Any soldier not at work to me is a missing soldier, and they don’t look at it like that," Wise said.

Wise is working with Maggie Haswell, president of Warriors Aftermath and Recovery, to write the legislation. Haswell advocates for missing and struggling soldiers.

She said she's seen situations like Stump's too many times. At Fort Bliss, the families of Jake Obad-Mathis and Melvin Jones say the Army refused to look for the two men for two weeks after they went missing, according to the Washington Post.

"It never gets easier, we lose them all the time," Haswell said. "Every case is different, but (the military) doesn't treat it different, and that’s not right."

Dakota's Law has all the petition support it needs, so now the next step is to get legislators interested in it. Haswell said she hopes for it to come up in the federal 2018 legislative session. But if she had it her way, she'd get it on lawmakers' desks immediately.

Follow Kara Berg on Twitter: @karaberg95