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FLINT, Glenn Nov 15, 01 NSW
Topic Started: Sep 15 2006, 12:28 PM (696 Views)
Dianne
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Glenn FLINT
DOB: 29/11/1974
HAIR: Red
BUILD: Medium
EYES: Green

CIRCUMSTANCES:

Glenn was last seen in Manly on 15 November 2001. Glenn suffers from epilepsy and requires medication to manage the condition. There are grave concerns for his safety and welfare.

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. ~Edmund Burke
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Dianne
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The Age

Brother where art thou?
July 31, 2005 - The Age

When Glenn Flint went missing more than four years ago, his sister Ellen was cast adrift. At the start of Missing Persons Week, she tells Peter Wilmoth about her endless search and the desperate longing to remember "what normal was like".

Early on some mornings, there were 10, maybe 15 seconds between sleep and waking when Ellen Flint was oblivious to the knowledge that her brother, Glenn, her only sibling, had left the house one day and never come back. Those few moments, before the brain was able to bring reality back into sharp focus, were treasures because Ellen was free of the torment that had come to define the rest of her life.

It was a breakthrough when she was finally able to sleep peacefully at night because when awake, for the first couple of years after Glenn went missing, there was no rest or relief. Her senses were always alert to the possibility that Glenn might be out there, needing help, wet or cold in the rain, not able to get home, maybe not knowing how to ring or what to say if he did. It was always wondering, and not knowing. Was he dead? Was he frightened to come home? Where the h**l was he?

Searching for a missing sibling means living in a world of wondering, of phantom sightings, a hazy nightmare of imagined possibilities. One morning, just after he disappeared, Ellen sat down at a table in the family back garden in Sydney, where, two weeks earlier, she and Glenn had had lunch. In the blustery wind she heard something moving behind the fence.

"Glenn?"

She stepped up onto a garden box and climbed onto the fence, her eyes "digging into the shadows". There was someone there, a man lying on a park bench, his back turned to her. She ran inside, through the house and down the side path. There was no one on the bench. She looked around. The park was empty. She ran to the other side of the park and looked for someone walking away. Nothing. No one. Just the wind.

You can't grieve. You can't get to grieve. You're trapped in the turmoil of wondering what we could have done better and what we still need to do.Much later, near a Sydney beach, Ellen thought she might have found Glenn. A man was sitting on some grass. His face was hidden under a moustache and beard, his hair was matted and almost in dreadlocks and he was thin, like Glenn had been. Ellen stared at him. "My throat felt tight," she writes in a new book. "This could be it."

She stared. "My right hand started to shake and I put it under my leg to make it stop. This was the closest I'd ever got." She stared for 10 minutes, hope rising as she ticked off the physical inventory: similar hands, hair, nose, build, way of rolling a cigarette. She approached him. "I'm sorry to disturb you," she whispered. "Is that you, Glenn?"

"He looked up at me and then I knew. Light blue eyes, not green. My chest caved into itself and I stepped back. 'My name's Thomas.' 'I'm sorry,' I said. 'Sorry Thomas.' "

Ellen walked, then ran away, running until her chest hurt. "It was OK," she writes. "There would still be times like these. I was all right, it was fine. It didn't matter how much time went by, there would always be times like these."

It was an acceptance of sorts. Glenn went missing on 16 November, 2001, his bedroom unchanged, no clothes or toothbrush or epilepsy medication taken. He didn't have a mobile to try because "you've got to have a life to have a mobile", he once told his sister. He left no note. He just disappeared, without leaving any clues. He was 26 years old, the adored brother of Ellen and son of Lindsay and Pauline.

Too many times, she says, she has replayed the first few minutes when the reality hadn't been confirmed, which began for Ellen years of mind games and the vacuum of not knowing. Something had to have happened to him. So however much time might have ameliorated the pain, the wonder and the hoping and the staring at people in the street would never end. That's how it was for Ellen after Glenn disappeared, and that's how it will probably always be.

Ellen Flint is sitting in a Melbourne office where she consults on mental illness in the workplace (she gave up her career in human resources at the Fairfax newspaper group after Glenn disappeared). Like the efficient human resources manager she once was, Ellen had arrived for our interview carrying a folder bearing key points.

Down on William Street in the mid-winter cold, people are hurrying around with their briefcases and mobile phones. Normal life. There was a time when Ellen would watch these rivers of people go by, or stand next to dance floors in nightclubs as the lights flashed, looking for Glenn, getting strange stares from the clubbers. Those terrible early days are over. Now her grief is on a different level, containable, a dull ache, just as real but not as raw. For an hour-and-a-half she answers many questions. At the end she says, with a slight sense of surprise and triumph: "I got through that without crying."

In her new book Every Eighteen Minutes, (so named because about 28,500 people are reported missing to police each year, an average of one person every 18 minutes) being released this week to coincide with Missing Persons Week, Ellen details the confusion and emotional chaos accompanying

News of her brother's disappearance amid his struggle with epilepsy and her parents' anguish and self-flagellation. She chronicles the severe depression and suicidal feelings she endured as the weeks and months ebbed away and the possibility of seeing Glenn again became more remote. "I just don't understand," her father said one day. "We were such an ordinary family."

Ellen remembers the first flurry of phone calls. She was crossing the road on a Sydney street after work when her mobile rang. It was her mother. Glenn was nowhere to be seen. She went to a bar with some friends. Her mobile again. Again her mother. "It's me, I'm just ringing to see if you've heard from Glenn." Ellen writes: "I remember thinking I was too tired for this tonight. That was my gut response. That I couldn't deal with this right now."

While giving a statement to police, a detective asked what she thought might have happened to Glenn. She told him: "I think he was in a deep depression. He could have committed suicide. He was really depressed and he didn't know it. We didn't know it. Maybe he couldn't take it any longer."

To cope with the pain, Ellen started writing letters to Glenn, lists of memories and what she was feeling. "I was hoping that by doing this I would stop replaying it in my mind. Two hundred pages later it was still gushing out."

It was one of many coping strategies. Losing Glenn might have destroyed her, just as it might have destroyed her parents. But there was the necessity of going on, however bleak that prospect seemed in the first few weeks after Glenn disappeared. Ellen had to be there for her parents, and she had to look after herself too. As tempting as it might have been to give up on life, the Flint family are now learning to live again, without Glenn.

For Ellen, moving to Melbourne two years ago was a big part of that journey. She moved here from her home town of Sydney for some distance from the overwhelming trauma of Glenn's disappearance, and from the pain and sadness of discussing - or avoiding discussing - her brother with her parents. "If you sit down with my parents we can go on for days," she says now. "We're always asking 'Did he suicide? Was he murdered? Did he decide on a new life?' Mum and Dad and I were talking about going away for a holiday, but we can't spend too much time together because it's too painful."

For those left behind, life has to go on. For Ellen, the rawness of the pain healed a little. It had to - anything else would destroy a person. Ellen found the months and years of being consumed by it gave way eventually to an ability to attempt normality. But the thought of Glenn always resurfaced. "I would vacillate between this conviction of knowing he was alive and I was playing tennis and tossed up a serve and felt this pain of knowing he was dead," she says. "You can't grieve. You can't get to grieve. You're trapped in the turmoil of wondering what we could have done better and what we still need to do."

For Ellen, that involved giving over her life to trying to find Glenn - or find out what happened to him. When she moved to Melbourne she would go after work to laneways, bars, nightclubs, looking for him. She became convinced Glenn would have been drawn to the "Englishness" of Melbourne. She writes: "A couple of nights a week I'd walk the grid of the city: up Flinders Street, down Flinders Lane, up Collins Street, down Little Collins Street, up and down all the way through to La Trobe. I scanned the laneways and would walk down the narrowest and darkest to make sure I wasn't missing anything because I couldn't see. I checked the restaurant staff through the windows and the church grounds and park benches."

Sometimes Ellen would look in the Queen Victoria Market, along Southbank and St Kilda Road. "In the cab on the way home I'd keep my head against the window and scan the street as best I could." She looked around Fitzroy, in every bar and pub and cafe along Brunswick Street. In Carlton. Along Chapel Street.

She would leave his photograph with bar staff, who were always kind and tried to be helpful. "It sounds ridiculous," she says now of the searches, "but if I found him it wouldn't have been ridiculous, would it? Sometimes there was a sense that he was there, almost that he was watching me."

The tortuous questioning has never ended. "My parents have spent a long time trying to figure out how everything went so wrong," Ellen writes. "They have picked over their lives looking for answers or any hint of how Glenn could disappear and where he might be now. It drove me mad listening to them, punishing themselves relentlessly, rehashing over small moments, a decision, a glance. They were looking for something that wasn't there."

She writes about the early days after the news. "I looked down at my mobile, willing it to ring. Glenn could have had a seizure and been hit by a car. He could have been attacked and left wounded in a back street. He could have finally had enough and thrown himself off The Gap. There were a million things that could have gone wrong."

She told herself to stop thinking this way. "Everything would be fine. Glenn wouldn't do anything to make us worry. He was out there and he was making his way home . . . Tomorrow we'd all be laughing again."

In the book, Ellen describes snapping awake to look at her mobile or cordless phone to see whether she'd missed any news; running through the possibilities with friends - "Perhaps he'd gone somewhere to take time out. He'd hurt himself. He'd killed himself. Someone had hurt him. He was in hospital somewhere"; writing emails to him ("I don't want to let you go"); checking the male toilet block at the beach ("I pushed each door, checking each cubicle"); a counsellor telling her after his disappearance she was "too close to Glenn's problems" and she had to distance herself - "I couldn't do it," she writes. "I couldn't walk away from my own brother."

Ellen writes about the h**l faced by the family left behind. "I imagined us like burns victims, stripped of our skin and too sensitive to touch, pained by even a shift in the breeze. A part of us had shut down."

She remembers the pain of not being able to cry. She had been very close to her brother. In later years she would worry about him and his struggle with epilepsy and symptoms of depression. But as carefree kids they would wait at the letterbox for their father to arrive home and whoever spotted him turning the street corner would win the privilege of climbing up his legs. Their mother had told them when they were young how pleased it made her that they got along so well. "There are brothers and sisters I know that don't spend much time together," she writes. "But we were also friends.

"Glenn had been my reason to live loud and large. Now I was wrecked. I sat down on the edge of the bath and put my head in my hands. I wanted to cry but nothing came. 'Cry, you idiot,' I screamed, pulling at my hair. Nothing. Suicide wasn't an option; I wouldn't be the final straw to finish my parents off. It would be a crappy life, but then perhaps that's just the luck of the draw."

Even though skilled with people from her job in human resources, it was difficult dealing with people's reaction to Glenn's disappearance. "You'd have to deal with other people's shock. You felt you had to console them."

Exhausted with waiting for the phone to ring, waiting for nothing, Ellen writes about the need to go back to work, and the jolt of seeing normality around her. "I stood in the lift and looked at the people around me. This was just a normal day for them. These people weren't falling apart. They didn't see there was a person in the lift with them that could simply implode."

At work she was "incapable of putting two coherent thoughts together"; she knew where she was, but didn't know what she should be doing; she panicked when she couldn't remember the sound of Glenn's voice; she remembers checking his bank for any transactions. She heard that 95 per cent of missing people turn up in the first two weeks, but her wait for news of Glenn had passed that time. Now, it was the constant phone calls from her parents and friends. "Any news?" "No, nothing."

The silence and the wondering can go on for years. Nearly two years after Glenn disappeared, Ellen was still in a state of panic, enduring what siblings of the missing go through: an obsession with detail (what was he wearing, what was he doing in the days before disappearing, where are the places he loved), with missed phone calls, feelings of guilt that their lives are going on while their sibling remains missing. Every time skeletal remains are discovered, there's a possibility that the wondering might end. Until then, or until a missing person comes home, a family's life is changed. "I wish I could remember what it felt like before," Ellen writes. "I want to remember what normal was like, when Glenn wasn't missing." (continued)

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. ~Edmund Burke
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Dianne
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This is the continuation of an article from The Age, an interview with Ellen Flint, sister of Glenn Flint.

"What did I think about back then, when I had the space in my head to think about anything else?"

The day before leaving for Melbourne, Ellen joined her parents for an information day on missing persons. A psychologist told the group that when loss is added to ambiguity, the result can be immobilising. Ellen remembers an elderly couple speaking of their daughter, who had disappeared from the NSW central coast 30 years earlier. The father "spoke with such softness and strength at the same time, I couldn't stop myself crying. It was the first time I had cried since Glenn had disappeared".

It soon became clear Glenn's disappearance had affected her health. One day outside The Age building in Melbourne, Ellen collapsed and thought she was dying. "I got this sensation that my body was already dying and I wanted to finish it off." She sought help from a doctor and was placed on anti-depressant medication, which allowed her to function again.

A diagnosis of depression helped explain some of her emotions and behaviour. A year ago she quit her job in HR and became a counsellor. As part of her work with a non-for-profit group called See-change, she consults and trains staff in the corporate world on how to identify and manage signs of mental illness. She also slowly began an involvement in what she calls the "missing" community.

Since the terrible early months, Ellen has managed her darker thoughts, and the family is mindful of not dwelling too much on the emptiness Glenn's disappearance caused. Ellen's parents are on the New South Wales Missing Persons Committee. "We can talk about it but we get to a point where we say 'That's enough'."

Ellen and her parents went on the ABC's Enough Rope and spoke with Andrew Denton about their experience. Afterwards, Ellen wrote Glenn an email. "God Glenn you'd be proud of Mum. Mum was so nervous about (going on) but Dad pushed and said it was such a large audience and a real hope of reaching people. The three of us were just terrified. But in reality, it wasn't the people or the cameras that put the fear of God into us, we just hoped you would understand. Now that our desperation is out there, I hope you hear us. If you're angry, come and tell us personally. We did it for you, but also for other missing people. We hope someone might think about phoning home. That's what Mum said, if not you, at least if someone else came home."

Initially Melbourne was somewhere to escape to, but now it's where she wants to stay. She has taken up photography and is working on another book. She feels some hope that she might one day enjoy what others take for granted, marriage, children, happy normality. "That is part of the managing process," Ellen says. "I refuse to be defined by my brother being missing, by having depression, whatever roadblocks I've had. I do want to live a full life."

She even sees some positives. "I would never have left a 12-hour-a-day corporate job. I earn a fraction of what I used to, but I have much more choice about how I live my life now. This has put me on a totally different path."

Her brother's disappearance is still an active case. She has felt frustration with the search, but feels for the police involved. "Our case was handled no better or worse than anyone else's. (The police) are amazing. They are dealing with totally distraught, strung-out people all the time."

Sergeant Steve Jeffrey of the New South Wales Missing Persons Unit, who has been following Glenn Flint's case from the start, says the case is still active. "They are a wonderful family," he says. "It's hard to imagine what families of missing persons go through." Sergeant Jeffrey has no theories about Glenn's fate.

Pauline and Lindsay Flint still live in the house from which Glenn disappeared. Mr Flint says they discussed moving "but there was a sense that we could never move because he might come back and he wouldn't be able to find us".

"We're managing," he says. "It's not something you get over. The acuteness of the pain and the sense of panic is ameliorated. The sadness isn't. We find for no apparent reason something will trigger us into a sense of despair and misery. It's very hard to find total joy."

Mr Flint and his wife were advised early to keep active in the aftermath of their son's disappearance. "We do see families withdraw and keep asking the same old questions - the ones you ask at two in the morning," he says. "If you allow that to happen to yourself too much it can be a downward spiral."

Glenn's disappearance had awakened him not only to the reality of people going missing but to the illness of depression, which he believes his son had been suffering before his disappearance. "I didn't understand his deteriorating behaviour. I didn't know much about depression. Five years ago I would have been fairly dismissive - I used to tell the kids 'Buck up and get on with it'. There needs to be a growing awareness not only of the illness but of its consequences."

Mr Flint holds out little hope of seeing his son again. "All three of us have taken the view that all our energies cannot be taken up with finding Glenn. We could beat the bushes all day but the prospect of finding him are next to zero. We went from initial feelings of shame and wanting to withdraw and keep the problem secret to wanting to talk about it. Now we can help others, which is therapeutic."

Ellen believes she might see Glenn again. "There have been cases where people came back after five years or 25 years. Initially it was too big to contemplate, but now I'm in a better place personally and I understand 'missing' so much better and I understand people do come back. There is always a strand of hope. It's manageable hope."

National Missing Persons Week runs from today until August 6. Its theme is "Talk, Don't Walk". For more information: www.missingpersons.gov.au or for counselling phone 1800 633063 or the National Missing Persons Unit on 1800 000634.

Online missing persons search launched
By Nick Ralston - The Australian
July 30, 2006

PAULINE Flint and her husband Lindsay say they have become very different people in the five years since their son Glenn went missing.
Glenn Flint was 26 years old when he went missing from the Manly district in Sydney's northern beaches in November 2001.

He has not been seen, or heard of since.

His parents now offer support to other parents who have lost children as well as giving talks to students at the New South Wales police college in Goulburn about their loss and their experiences.

"It's life changing, we're different people now," Mrs Flint said.

"We were given some advice early in the piece by an elderly lady who had lost her daughter 25 years before.

"She said it was better to be proactive than inactive and from that moment on, we thought even if we couldn't find Glenn, if we could help other families it will make us feel a bit better about our situation."

The Flints today joined NSW Police Minister Carl Scully and Police Commissioner Ken Moroney in launching an online database of missing persons.

The launch coincided with the start of Missing Persons Week. There are currently 568 cases in NSW of people who have been missing for 12 months or more.

Mr Scully said it was hoped the database will make it easier for the public to assist police in finding missing persons.

"At the moment, photographs of missing persons are pinned up on the walls of police stations, printed in a daily newspaper or flashed up on a television for a few seconds at best," Mr Scully said.

"While these may have been the best methods available in the past, it's now time to take advantage of the widespread public use of the internet and digital cameras."

The database will be linked via the NSW Police website and contains a photograph and description of the person who is missing.

It is the first time such a database has been made available online.

Mr Moroney said if it proved successful he would have no hesitations in sharing the concept with his counterparts in other states.

"We'll see how it works in NSW, early days give me great optimism," Mr Moroney saud.

A national missing persons database was first mooted in 1991 under the Labor government, while in 2005 an inquiry into the wrongful detention of Cornelia Rau recommended one be established urgently.

Glenn and his sister Ellen photo:
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All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. ~Edmund Burke
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monkalup
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The Old Heifer! An oxymoron, of course.
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More than two years ago, Pauline and Lindsay Flint's son Glenn lost all contact with his family. He was last seen by a doctor, as he'd been feeling unwell. Since then, Pauline's father has passed away. Glenn's parents and his sister Ellen miss his wicked sense of humour and just want him to come home again. Pauline Flint struggles to describe how much she misses her beloved son ...

"Glenn was living at our place and working in hotels and restaurants around Manly. He went to see a doctor (who was the last person to see Glenn) on November 14, 2001, as he hadn't been feeling very well. No-one saw him after that.

"I became aware he was missing the next day, because his friends were calling us, saying he wasn't keeping appointments.

"We did searches ourselves of Manly in a grid pattern, but when trying to do something like that, you discover how futile it can be. We realised he could have been in another state or city before anyone knew he was missing. We thought maybe he'd felt like a break from family or maybe he'd gone to stay with friends.

"One of the biggest problems I've had is his grandfather was suffering from dementia and he'd ask after Glenn. I couldn't tell him Glenn was missing because he was too fragile. When he asked about Glenn, I'd say he was fine, but after six months passed I was struggling to keep lying to my own father. That was so difficult. Dad died two months ago, I'm very sad, because Glenn doesn't know his grandfather has died.

"Glenn's popular and friendly, he likes to party and always has many wonderful friends.

"It's been two years and it's starting to get very hard for me. I can still feel his strong, curly hair when I'd give him a hug. He had a wicked sense of humour and we all miss it enormously.

"His sister Ellen misses him so much. She's struggled for so long wondering, "What did we do wrong?" She's writing a book about him going missing and she had lots of photos printed out for the barmen at the city nightspots so they could say if he was around.

"Only 22 months separate Ellen and Glenn. She's devastated by him going. We're a small family and so close. We'd all be so happy to have him back home.

"I gave a speech once and in it I mentioned the emotions you go through when this happens. After listing all of them I added, "There's another feeling you experience, heartache. Your heart just aches."

If you have information, please call Chris Cole at the Salvation Army on (02) 9211 0277.

- with thanks to WOMAN'S DAY magazine

Lauran

"If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you, and you don't do that, you are wasting your time on this earth." The late, great Roberto Clemente.


In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment for non-profit research and educational purposes only.
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monkalup
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The Old Heifer! An oxymoron, of course.
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http://z13.invisionfree.com/PorchlightAust...topic=201&st=0&
Lauran

"If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you, and you don't do that, you are wasting your time on this earth." The late, great Roberto Clemente.


In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment for non-profit research and educational purposes only.
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monkalup
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The Old Heifer! An oxymoron, of course.
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GLENN FLINT
DOB: 29/11/1974
HAIR: Brown BUILD: Medium EYES: Green
CIRCUMSTANCES:
Glenn was last seen in the Manly area on 15th of November, 2001. He failed to keep appointments the next day. There are concerns for his safety and welfare.
Reported missing to: Manly Police Station.
http://www.policensw.com/missing/text/006.html

Notice discrepancy in date missing
Lauran

"If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you, and you don't do that, you are wasting your time on this earth." The late, great Roberto Clemente.


In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment for non-profit research and educational purposes only.
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monkalup
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The Old Heifer! An oxymoron, of course.
[ *  *  * ]
http://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/prod/PARL...y/LA20041027006
Lauran

"If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you, and you don't do that, you are wasting your time on this earth." The late, great Roberto Clemente.


In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment for non-profit research and educational purposes only.
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