An 11-year-old girl has been missing from West Philadelphia for nearly a week, and investigators believe she may have traveled across the Schuylkill River into North Philadelphia. Mailiha Jenkins was last seen on August 1 around 11 a.m. on the 5400 block of West Girard Avenue, according to the Philadelphia Police Department, and she has not been located since.
The Philadelphia Police Department issued a public bulletin on Friday, August 7, asking for the public's help finding her, nearly a week after she vanished from the Carroll Park neighborhood. As reported by Newport Dispatch, Jenkins is 5 feet 5 inches tall, weighs about 130 pounds, and was last seen wearing a black t-shirt and black sweatpants. The 5400 block of West Girard Avenue sits within Carroll Park, a densely populated residential stretch of West Philadelphia along the Girard Avenue transit corridor, according to Zillow property records for the area.
Girard Avenue falls under the jurisdiction of the department's 19th Police District, which covers patrol operations in West Philadelphia neighborhoods including Carroll Park and Haddington, per the Philadelphia Police Department. While patrol officers from that district responded to the initial report, primary responsibility for investigating Jenkins' disappearance now rests with the department's Southwest Detective Division, which oversees major criminal and missing person cases across West and Southwest Philadelphia.
A Possible Path Across the River
Police say Jenkins may now be in the area of 26th and Stewart Streets, a location in North Philadelphia's Brewerytown section that sits roughly 3.5 miles northeast of where she was last seen. Reaching that area from West Girard Avenue would require crossing the Schuylkill River and traveling along major urban arterials, a detail that suggests to investigators she may have moved well outside her immediate neighborhood since disappearing nearly a week ago.
Police are urging anyone with information to contact the Southwest Detective Division at 215-686-3183 or to call 911, the same guidance issued in the department's public bulletin. No additional details about the circumstances of her disappearance have been released.
Why No Amber Alert Was Issued
Some readers may wonder why Jenkins' case has not triggered Pennsylvania's Amber Alert system, which broadcasts urgent warnings statewide. Under state rules, an Amber Alert requires confirmed proof that a child has been abducted and faces imminent danger of death or serious bodily harm, and it explicitly excludes cases classified as runaways or unconfirmed disappearances, according to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania also maintains a separate Missing Endangered Person Advisory system for cases that do not meet that strict abduction threshold but still involve people considered at risk due to age, health, or environmental dangers.
Under Philadelphia Police Department Directive 12.13, detective division supervisors are required to ensure investigators re-interview whoever reported the disappearance within 72 hours, and to maintain weekly contact with that person for at least a month, a mandate first outlined by the department in 2018. That protocol governs standard follow-up procedures for missing juvenile and adult cases across all PPD detective divisions.
The Broader Numbers Behind Missing Children Cases
Jenkins' disappearance adds to a large national caseload. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children assisted with 32,167 missing child cases in 2025 and achieved a 90 percent recovery rate, according to MissingKids.org. As of the end of 2025, the FBI's National Crime Information Center listed 21,487 active missing person records for juveniles under 18, roughly 24 percent of all active missing person files in the country, per data compiled by CaseTrace.
A 2025 report from the National Child Identification Program also found that Black youth are disproportionately represented in missing child reports nationally, with Black girls between the ages of 11 and 21 reported missing at four times the rate of their white counterparts. Anyone with information about Mailiha Jenkins' whereabouts is asked to contact Philadelphia police.
