His twin newborn sons went missing in Philly last summer. Now reunited, a father fights to make the system work better

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Stanton Cornish-Bell first held his twin newborn sons shortly after they were delivered in an operating room last June at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia. They were small, he said, but full term and healthy.

He took photos with them, bought blue blankets embroidered with each of their names and wrote down little notes with their heights and weights as keepsakes.

It was a happy moment in a relationship with many ups and downs. He and the twins’ mother had a history of custody issues regarding their older 2-year-old son, who lives with Cornish-Bell.

“I would definitely say excitement,” he said of his feelings at the time. “You’re just optimistic.”

But that optimism was soon replaced by fear and alarm.

Cornish-Bell said two days after the twins’ birth, the plan was for him, the babies and their mother to all leave and go home together. But when he returned to the hospital with car seats ready to go, he said a family member intervened, made threats, took the car seats and eventually left with the babies and their mother.

“I truly don’t know where my children are, is what I mean when I say truly missing,” he said. “I walked out as a father who did not have the similar chances for my children to go home safe, to an environment that would be safe.”

This began a nearly three-month desperate search for his children, which involved going through family court and relying on city social service agencies, local law enforcement, lawyers and national missing children support organizations.

Flyers showing the tiny faces of his newborns, swaddled in blue, began spreading in Philadelphia, making their way across various social media platforms.

But it would take several more weeks until Cornish-Bell was reunited with his sons.

At the heart of the issue, he said, was the question of whether this should be treated urgently as a missing children’s case, or a simpler custody battle — something to be figured out in family court with child welfare experts.

‘Nobody was taking me seriously’

Custody situations, especially involving newborn children where there’s not yet a legally binding custody agreement in place, can be a gray area.

In a statement last August, a Jefferson Health spokesperson said the twins were appropriately discharged to their mother as per hospital policy, which ensures that newborns stay in the care of adults who have parental or guardianship rights.

But Cornish-Bell, who also had parental rights, said he became an afterthought and accused the hospital of overlooking threatening behavior by the family member who later left with the babies and their mother.

When he wasn’t able to find out the babies’ location from the children’s mother, Cornish-Bell said he began to fear the worst. Soon, he turned to the Philadelphia Department of Human Services and the police for help.

“When we think of DHS … you think that they’re all things children, if there’s an emergency involving children,” he said. “When you think of Philadelphia police, if there’s a crime, they’re going to stop it.”

But Cornish-Bell said it was hard to get authorities to take the case seriously.

He spent many hours every day on the phone with police and following up with detectives and investigators in Philadelphia. But he said there was still disagreement on whether this was truly a missing children’s case or a less serious custody issue.

“It was like nobody was taking me seriously at this point,” he said.

More than two weeks after the twins were born, Cornish-Bell was in family court where Judge Daniel Sulman agreed that the infants may be at risk and granted emergency custody on June 25.

The twin newborns were to be “immediately returned to the custody” of their father and “law enforcement shall assist in locating the two minor children,” court documents stated.

An official missing person’s report was filed with Philadelphia police on June 27.

“I was being told that there were commissioners involved, I was being told that supervisors were involved, and I also was being told that this was going to be taken care of,” Cornish-Bell said.

Meanwhile, Cornish-Bell moved in with family in Delaware, who could help care for his older son while he continued to work and complete a second master’s degree in business at West Chester University.

He leaned on a support system of parents, uncles, aunts, siblings, friends and his church friends to deal with the constant stress.

“There were so many unknowns,” Cornish-Bell said. “Some of these situations outside of just becoming a father, with situations I’d never thought I’d be in, those [are] times where you really don’t know who’s supporting you until you need it.”

He devoted every spare moment to the search for his infant sons, following up on tips from old neighbors in Philadelphia and searching for any updates he could get from law enforcement.

But as the weeks passed, his frustrations grew. He said it seemed like efforts to find his children lacked urgency. He wondered, would it be different if this were a mother searching for her kids instead of a father?

“I’ve had people say, ‘Well, if the kids [are] with mom, they’re not missing.’ That’s not the truth,” he said.

‘These kids are in danger’

Kids under the age of 18 are considered missing if they run away, become lost or are abducted by a stranger.

They’re also missing if they disappear with a parent or family member, which is the second-most common type of missing children’s scenario after endangered runaways, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

John Bischoff, vice president of the Missing Children Division, said it’s tempting to think that as long as a child is with a parent or a loved one, that they’ll be safe.

“Well, that’s not always the case,” he said. “In some of these, you know, it’s a horrible custody battle, and sometimes it’s one parent just leaving another.”

Missing cases involving custody issues should be treated with the same urgency and seriousness as other situations, Bischoff said.

“For a family abduction, when you see that term or you hear that term, these kids are in danger,” he said. “Law enforcement is looking for them.”

In July, images of Cornish-Bells’ two infant sons, their tiny faces and matching blue outfits were added to the NCMEC national database of missing children after the organization confirmed with local law enforcement that they were missing and that there was an open investigation.

Bischoff was not authorized to speak specifically on the Cornish-Bell twins case, but said the national database includes thousands of missing children’s cases and posters from across the country, each linked to a verified active or open investigation by local authorities.

“So every poster you see out there, there’s a law enforcement agency behind that poster searching for that missing child,” he said. “And the reason for that is we need when you see a poster, it’s a call for public action. It’s a call for public support in finding that missing child.”

But when WHYY asked the Philadelphia Police Department last August to confirm the authenticity of the posters and the case of the missing twin newborns, a police spokesperson said in an email that the children were not missing and that it was “a civil matter, involving a custody case.”

Several days later after a request for more information, police stated that there was an active investigation and that detectives were working to “ascertain where the children are located.”

But the children and their pictures were never posted to the police department’s online blotter for active missing person’s cases.

Philadelphia police did not respond to new requests asking for an explanation on the conflicting information.

‘We want to see change’

On Aug. 28, Cornish-Bell finally got the call he’d been anxiously waiting for. Authorities had tracked down the twins and their mother at a vacant property and were prepared to enter.

Less than 24 hours later, he was standing in a grocery store parking lot in Center City with authorities, trying to identify his sons. It’d been nearly three months since he last saw them.

“I immediately knew something was wrong with the children. They didn’t look well kept,” Cornish-Bell said. “It was surprising for me to see them like that.”

Cornish-Bell soon took them to see health care providers at Nemours Children’s Health, where they assured him that the babies would be OK.

He felt relieved, but also disappointed in himself.

“Because I felt like I tried very hard to save them,” he said with a catch in his voice and fighting back tears. “And I don’t know if there was anything else I could have done.”

Cornish-Bell took the babies home to Delaware, where they were reunited with their older brother.

The father of three said the exhaustion of this ordeal quickly caught up with him.

“You know, calling some family and friends to let them know that I did get the children back and I would need some financial assistance and I need some prayers,” he said. “It was a lot.”

It’ll be a while before his family can recover — mentally, physically and financially, he said. And more custody hearings and meetings are in his future. But he has hope, especially now as he watches the babies begin to crawl, play with their brother and create a new normal routine.

Now, Cornish-Bell said he’s focused on increasing awareness about missing children and the resources available to families, and to advocate for better policies around how these cases are handled by health care professionals, police and other authorities.

“If I could say one thing to them, it would be, ‘I went out to do everything you told me to do, why didn’t you do everything I asked of you?’” he said. “We want to see change so that nobody else has to go through it.”