A beloved local mother, daughter, sister and friend turned 22 on Friday, and though her loved ones gathered in her honor, they had nothing to celebrate. Ruthie Smith has been missing since March 2022, after police say she was abducted by traffickers.
“She just likes to be goofy. She was really shy, and she really kept to herself, you know, just a kindhearted person,” said Smith’s neighbor Desiree Cortez. “She’s always smiling and always wanted to just love on everybody. […] We just hope that she just comes back to us. It’s not going to be the same, but we’ll be here for her no matter what, and embrace her just like she never left.”
Cortez helped Smith’s family get in contact with former Long Beach city Councilmember Al Austin, who recently helped them secure a free billboard from advertising company Clear Channel that publicly displays Smith’s photo and identifying information near the corner of Orange Avenue and Spring Street. To bring more attention to the case, Smith’s family and friends held a press conference beneath the billboard for her birthday on Friday, before joining hands and praying together for her safe return.
Smith is described as a biracial (Black and white) woman, with brown hair and brown eyes, standing 5 feet 6 inches, and weighing 152 pounds. She was 19 at the time of her disappearance, and would now be 22 years old. Smith also goes by the aliases Grayson and Winter. She has a pierced nose and belly button, the names “Ezra” and “Lamarion” tattooed near one of her ears, and the name “Ocean” tattooed on her chest along with a wave.
Smith would engage in sex work on Figueroa Street in Los Angeles, an area infamous for prostitution and sex trafficking, as a way to support her infant daughter, her family said. Smith was last seen in the area on March 3, 2022. The Long Beach Police Department (LBPD) believes she was victimized by human traffickers.
Smith’s grandmother, Ingrid Klungreseter, told the Signal Tribune that the family most recently heard from Long Beach homicide detectives shortly after Thanksgiving, soon after the billboard with Smith’s face and information went up. Before that, they had not heard from detectives about the case in over a year, Klungreseter said. The most recent update was to inform the family that the body of a Jane Doe found in Big Bear was confirmed not to be Smith’s.
Smith’s family believes police aren’t doing enough to find her
Smith’s family believes that the Long Beach and Los Angeles police departments are not doing enough to find her. It was Smith’s mother, Kathryn Renesto, who found the last known footage of Smith by going around the LA neighborhood where she was last seen and asking for local business’ security footage.
The security camera of an apartment building caught the last known recording of Smith, as she was getting into a vehicle before it drove off. The license plate can’t be seen in the video.
“I do believe that more resources should go to the police department to be able to help in finding these trafficked young women and for them to care. Not just, ‘Oh well, they’re just walking the streets so it doesn’t matter.’ It does matter. It does matter. And if we have that mentality, these human traffickers are going to keep getting away with it, because nobody cares about these girls,” Klungreseter said. “Do I feel like they let us down? Yeah, I do. I do in a lot of ways, I feel they’ve let us down because they’ve looked at it like, ‘Well, that was just a bad life choice.’ A lot of the information that they have, we’ve given them. We went up into Wrightwood. My family went up there and took pictures and found information and saw where her phone pinged. We took the route that her phone pinged on. They didn’t do any of that. They relied on what we were giving them. Which is sad. That’s sad because I don’t understand. I don’t get it.”
The Signal Tribune emailed LBPD on Dec. 28 to ask if police had searched for security footage of Smith, or if they had tracked her phone location in the wake of her disappearance. LBPD responded by saying “Following the disappearance of Ruthey Smith, our detectives actively pursued all leads. Our detectives continue to actively pursue all leads in this investigation.” This response did not answer the question that was asked.
“The challenge was law enforcement taking it seriously from the very beginning,” said Moses Castillo, a private investigator and retired LAPD detective that has been hired by the family. “We lost some valuable time, and now we’re here almost three years later, still no whereabouts, she’s off the radar. She’s nowhere to be found anywhere, on paper, on the internet.”
Smith’s family believe that her doing sex work and being Black have contributed to a lack of attention and resources towards her case. Klungreseter pointed out the recent, widely publicized case of Hannah Kobayashi as an example of the amount of resources and press a missing person case can garner. Unlike Smith, Kobayashi was determined to be voluntarily missing by authorities, and was able to reunite with her family.
“I definitely feel like they don’t do enough when Black women go missing, it’s unfair,” said Renesto, who is white. “They need to do more. My daughter deserves to matter, just like I would matter if I went missing.”
Black women and girls in Long Beach and across the nation are trafficked at a higher rate. The majority (59%) of human trafficking victims found by police in Long Beach from 2017 to 2022 were Black, despite Black people only making up 12.1% of Long Beach’s total population, according to data the Signal Tribune obtained from LBPD.
Anyone who may have information about Ruthey Smith is urged to call the LBPD Missing Persons Detail at (562) 570-7246 or Police Dispatch at (562) 435-6711. Those who wish to remain anonymous may submit a tip through “LA Crime Stoppers” by calling 1-800-222-TIPS (8477) or visiting www.lacrimestoppers.org.
