Locating Missing Persons: The First 72 Hours
Most missing-person cases resolve in the first 72 hours — or take months. What you do in those first three days matters more than anything that follows.
What police will and will not do
Florida law enforcement responds to missing-adult cases on a triage basis. Adults have the legal right to disappear, and absent indication of foul play, mental incapacity, or risk to the missing person, departments are not obligated to open an active investigation.
What that means in practice: a missing-adult report typically results in a BOLO (be on the lookout) entry, a NCIC missing-persons entry, and a follow-up call when the person uses a credit card, gets a traffic citation, or is contacted by another agency. It does not result in detectives walking the route, canvassing the apartments, or pulling private surveillance footage.
Missing-juvenile cases get full active response. So do adult cases involving documented mental illness, dementia, suicidal ideation, or evidence of foul play. The middle ground — a competent adult who just stopped answering the phone — is where most families find themselves frustrated by the limits of the police response. That is where private investigation fills the gap.
The first 24 hours: what to preserve
The first 24 hours are about evidence preservation, not searching. Specifically:
1. Photograph the missing person's room or living space exactly as it is before anyone touches anything. Note what is present and what is conspicuously absent — phone charger gone, suitcase gone, ID gone, medications left behind, all of these tell stories.
2. Write down every person the missing person had contact with in the prior two weeks, with names, phone numbers, and relationship. The 'last person to see' chain is the spine of any subsequent investigation.
3. Pull and preserve any household surveillance footage before it rolls. Most home systems retain only 7 to 30 days. Pull it now.
4. Note the missing person's vehicle license plate, make, model, color, and any distinguishing features.
5. Do not delete anything from any device the missing person used. Do not factory-reset, do not 'clean up,' do not 'tidy.' If you have access to their accounts, do not log in unless an investigator or attorney advises it — that creates legal exposure for you and forensic noise on the device.
When to call a private investigator
If the missing person is a competent adult and 24 hours have passed with no reasonable explanation for the silence, an investigator should be on the case. Every additional 24 hours doubles the difficulty of the trace.
Reasons families call us instead of waiting on police: the missing person is in another state and no agency has primary jurisdiction; the missing person has assets, business interests, or a custody case that creates incentives for adverse parties; the missing person has substance-abuse or mental-health history that suggests they may have gone to ground voluntarily and needs to be located gently; or the family simply cannot tolerate doing nothing.
Our missing-persons work runs on a different rhythm than other investigations. The first 48 hours are intensive — multiple investigators, immediate database work, immediate field canvass, immediate footage preservation. After that, if the trail is cold, the work shifts to long-running surveillance of likely locations and witness re-interviews.
Where competent adults usually are
Most missing competent adults are found in one of four categories: with a family member or friend the searching family did not know about; in a hotel or motel within 100 miles of the disappearance point; in a vehicle (running from a problem they did not tell anyone about); or in a hospital or psychiatric facility under a different name or in a state of incapacity.
Each category has a known set of investigative steps. Hospital and jail canvasses, hotel/motel canvasses against the vehicle description, license-plate-reader queries through licensed channels, financial-trace analysis through lawful means — all of these run in parallel in the first week.
When the case turns into something else
Some percentage of missing-person investigations turn out to involve foul play. When the evidence points that way, the case has to be handed back to law enforcement with everything we have collected, properly documented. We do not investigate homicides as a private firm — that is law enforcement's jurisdiction. Our job is to identify, in those cases, the precise evidence that escalates the matter from a missing-adult BOLO to an active investigation.
We have made that handoff more than once. The earlier in the timeline it happens, the more likely the case is solved.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I have to wait 48 hours to file a missing-person report?
No. That is a myth. Florida law enforcement will accept a missing-person report immediately and is required to enter it into NCIC promptly. The 'wait 48 hours' idea has no basis in Florida statute.
How much does a missing-person investigation cost?
Cases vary widely. Active short-term searches typically run $3,500 to $10,000 for the first week of intensive work, then move to a slower retainer if the trail extends. We provide a written scope and budget at engagement.
Will you work with the police department on the case?
Yes when appropriate. We have working relationships with detectives across South Florida and Central Florida. Where the case crosses into criminal territory we coordinate and share what we have found.
Need an investigator on your case?
Call Jeff Giordano directly, 24/7. Florida-licensed, decades of courtroom-tested investigative experience.