These two articles are from the Boston Globe in 1996. (Am posting the texts of them because they're so old that a subscription to an archive service is needed to see the entirely...but MA Right to Life posted them in full.)
I see NO reason to discredit Romney and the Gay family for these accounts of the
desperate situation they were in.
And by the way, even
if it were found out later that the girl had been safe in a home in NJ, the fact that she was missing to her parents and they didn't know whether she was dead or alive or alive and being tortured
is every parent's worst nightmare.
Most people could only WISH to have a friend as loyal and dedicated as Mitt Romney and partners who did this search:
The Boston Globe
July 12, 1996, Friday, City Edition
Investment firm shuts to help find girl; 50 employees fly to NYC in search for teen-ager
By Shirley Leung, Globe Staff
When Bain Capital Inc. executives learned the 14-year-old daughter of a business partner was missing, they responded by closing the Boston company's office and flew about 50 employees to New York City to look for the girl themselves.
Yesterday, in their first day of searching, they pounded the pavement,plastered the city with 200,000 fliers and quizzed teen-agers at concerts and parks.
But as of late last night, Melissa Gay was still nowhere to be found.
"Our children are what life is all about," said W. Mitt Romney, founder and managing partner of Bain Capital. "Everything else takes a back seat."
Bob Gay, one of 12 managing directors of Bain Capital, last saw his daughter Saturday. The family lives in Ridgefield, Conn., and Melissa had been dropped off at the local tennis club around 3:30 that afternoon.
When her mother, Lynette, called the club around 6 p.m. to see if Melissa had finished playing, club staff said she wasn't there. Lynette and Bob Gay assumed their daughter had grabbed a bite to eat with her tennis partner.
Bob Gay waited until 2 that night. His daughter never came home. "That's when we knew something was not right," he said in a telephone interview last night from New York City.
They called all her friends and then called police. They soon learned that Melissa had hopped a train with several friends to New York Saturday night to catch the Rock Rave-Fantasia II concert in Manhattan.
Her friends returned to Connecticut without Melissa sometime Sunday. Bob Gay doesn't believe his daughter ran away, because she didn't take any clothes and had only $ 10 with her. "I believe she fully intended to go to the concert without telling us, but not stay there in the city," he said.
Ridgefield and New York police are working together. Hospitals have been checked and arrest records canvassed, Gay has been told.
New York police said her friends last saw her at a party at 11 a.m. Sunday near the Whitestone Bridge, which connects Queens and the Bronx.
Last night, officials from both departments would not comment on the case, except to say that the investigation is continuing. But Bob Gay just couldn't sit back and watch.
On Wednesday he walked the streets of Manhattan looking for his blonde daughter, who was last seen wearing a blue or red-striped shirt and baggy tan pants.
Gay, who has worked for Bain for eight years, kept his ordeal to himself, confiding only in Romney. But Wednesday, Romney decided to tell the other 11 managing directors, and they decided that finding a missing daughter was more important than operating a $ 1 billion investment firm.
The executives decided not only to give their time but their money, paying all expenses for the search for the fifth of Gay's seven children.
That night, 16 employees flew to New York, turned a function room of the Laguardia Marriott Hotel into a "war room," and got printing giant R. R. Donnelly to print 200,000 fliers with a color picture of Melissa. They also hired a private investigator and set up an 800-number hot line.
Another 40 employees caught an early morning shuttle yesterday, and later were joined by about 250 colleagues from other Wall Street firms, including Goldman Sachs, Price Waterhouse and Bankers Trust.
"Most of us have children," said Stephen Pagliuca, 44, a Bain managing director with four children. "That's the most important thing in our lives. It wasn't even a question. We just decided to do it."
Anyone with information on Melissa Gay can call 1-800-783-7454, extension 1111.
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Then ... about six months later.
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The Boston Globe
December 8, 1996, Sunday, City Edition
Bain Capital recalls NY search
BYLINE: By Peter S. Canellos, Globe Staff
Last week, the partners of Boston's Bain Capital Inc. drew up their annual list of accomplishments: Number one was the week they spent last July combing Manhattan in search of Melissa Gay, the missing 14-year-old daughter of one of the partners.
"It really overshadowed everything we did from a money standpoint," said Mitt Romney, the Bain Capital founder who won the 1994 Massachusetts Republican Senate nomination partly on his reputation as a venture capital wiz. "The days and nights spent looking for Missy Gay were more valuable than some financial home runs that made the front page of the Wall Street Journal. I mean, money is just money."
The 15 Bain Capital partners chartered a plane to New York to search for the missing youngster among the thousands of abandoned children and runaways who congregate in Manhattan.
They didn't find her themselves. She turned up in Montville, N.J. The Associated Press reported at the time that she was dazed from a disorienting dose of a drug taken at a rock concert.
Now back in school and fully recovered, Melissa and her parents are doing well, Romney said. The partners, however, are still taking stock of their visit to the dark corners of New York, putting up posters and talking to runaways outside seedy nightclubs and peep shows. Romney said he can't escape some of the images he carries with him from his week in the New York underworld.
"It was a shocker," he said. "The number of lost souls was astounding."
Romney said one partner still talks about a runaway he spoke with in search of information about Melissa.
"The girl asked, 'Why are you looking for her?' and he said, 'Because her parents miss her,' " Romney said. "She replied, 'I wish my parents
missed me like that.' "
Mass Pro-Life
05-13-2012, 12:18 AM
