A 14-year-old Bellingham boy has been missing since Monday evening, when he left home on foot headed for Bellis Fair Mall and never turned up. Terrence Charlie was last seen around 5 p.m. on August 10, wearing a white T-shirt with designs on the back, jeans and black shoes. He stands 5 feet 2 inches tall, weighs about 130 pounds, and has brown hair and brown eyes.
The Washington State Patrol activated a statewide Missing Indigenous Person Alert on Charlie's behalf Thursday, working at the request of the Bellingham Police Department, according to a post from WSP Missing Person Alerts. The alert request landed with State Patrol on August 13 — three days after Charlie was last seen leaving home. He is classified as an at-risk missing person, and anyone who spots him is asked to call 911 immediately. Bellingham police are also fielding tips through their non-emergency line at 360-676-6911, tied to case number 26B46137.
Why the Gap Between Disappearance and Alert
The three-day span between Charlie's last sighting and the statewide broadcast reflects how Washington's alert system is built to work. The Washington State Patrol only activates a Missing Indigenous Person Alert at the request of the investigating local law-enforcement agency, and it requires the missing person to be Indigenous and to have vanished under unexplained, involuntary or suspicious circumstances — or to be otherwise unable to safely return without help, according to Washington State Patrol procedures. Investigators also need enough descriptive detail on hand before an alert can go out broadly enough to be useful to the public.
That threshold also explains a detail some residents may notice: there are no electronic highway signs flashing Charlie's description along Interstate 5 or Guide Meridian Road. The same State Patrol guidance notes that variable message boards are reserved for cases with a specific vehicle description and license plate, since the signs have limited character space designed for drivers passing at speed. Charlie was on foot, so the alert instead relies on subscriber lists, news coverage and social media to reach the public.
A Regional Mall as the Last Known Destination
Bellis Fair Mall, where Charlie was headed when he left home, is an enclosed regional shopping center sitting off I-5 and State Route 539 in northern Bellingham, according to Visit Bellingham. It functions as one of Whatcom County's busiest commercial and transit gathering points, the kind of high-traffic public destination that can make a missing person's trail both easier to search and harder to pin down once they arrive.
Whatcom County itself sits within the ancestral territories of two federally recognized Coast Salish nations, the Lummi Nation headquartered along Bellingham Bay and the Nooksack Indian Tribe based near Deming, per the same Visit Bellingham account. The Lummi Nation ranks as the third-largest tribe in Washington state.
Washington's Alert System and a Persistent Disparity
Washington became the first state in the nation to create a dedicated alert system for missing Native residents when Governor Jay Inslee signed House Bill 1725, sponsored by Rep. Debra Lekanoff, in April 2022, as Seattle Met reported at the time. The Missing Indigenous Person Alert system launched under the State Patrol that July, giving investigators statewide broadcast tools that hadn't existed before.
Between the system's launch and this past November, the State Patrol activated 194 such alerts statewide, helping local police locate dozens of missing individuals, FOX 13 Seattle reported. The volume reflects a stark statistical gap: State Patrol data from 2023 showed Indigenous Washingtonians going missing at a rate of 34.32 per 100,000 residents, more than four times the general population's rate of 8.04 per 100,000, according to Real Change. National NamUs data has ranked Washington fifth in the country for per capita missing persons.
State lawmakers have built out additional infrastructure to address the crisis. In 2023, the Legislature created and funded the nation's first Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and People Cold Case Unit inside the state Attorney General's Office, which assists municipal, county and tribal agencies and runs a 24-hour tip line, according to the Washington State Attorney General's Office. Last year, the state's MMIWP Task Force also released a toolkit built by its Families Subcommittee to help relatives navigate reporting, search coordination and media outreach in the early days of a disappearance, compiled from years of listening sessions with affected families.
Charlie's case is one of several Missing Indigenous Person Alerts issued around Washington in recent days, including for a 16-year-old missing from Aberdeen and a 15-year-old missing from Vancouver since July. No further updates on Charlie's whereabouts have been released. Anyone with information is urged to call 911 or the Bellingham Police Department's non-emergency line.
