Ever heard of Romona Moore? I hadn’t either. She was a 21-year-old Hunter College student who lived in the Canarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn with her parents, who are immigrants from Guyana. When she left the house to go to Burger King one night five years ago and didn’t return by the next morning, her mother, Elle Carmichael, called the police. The police told her she shouldn’t even be calling for a 21-year-old missing woman. They didn’t help and closed the complaint that an officer had drafted out of pity. In the four days that followed, as the police refused to help Carmichael by opening an investigation, Romona Moore was being raped and tortured by two men in a house a few blocks from her home. They beat her death on the day that police reluctantly launched an investigation. Carmichael had to help the police find her daughter’s body by conducting her own amateur investigation.

Contrast Moore’s disappearance with one that occurred two months prior, in February of 2003. Svetlana Aronov, the wife of a white doctor on the Upper East Side, vanished while taking her dog for a walk. According to the Village Voice, the police launched a huge search the day after Aronov disappeared: “The NYPD called a press conference, assigned two dozen detectives to the case full-time, and went door to door, passing out flyers with pictures of Aronov and [the dog] on them. The cops traced the Aronovs’ phone and bank records and analyzed surveillance tape gathered from stores and apartment buildings near her home. A police van emblazoned with the department’s 800 tip-line number drove around her neighborhood, blaring details of her disappearance over a loudspeaker. A letter was sent to rare-books dealers, a business the Aronovs dabbled in. Detectives reportedly even consulted a psychic. A bloodhound was assigned to track [the dog]’s scent.” Aronov was found dead in the East River.

The difference in the way the cops approached her daughter’s disappearance and Aronov’s was not lost on Carmichael. “If this was a white kid, they would never had done this,” she told the VV. “I had to say to the detectives one day: ‘You know, I feel the same emotions and pain as a white person.’ ” Carmichael’s not the only one who has experienced this bias. Last month, a Brooklyn federal judge has allowed Carmichael to proceed with a civil rights lawsuit against the NYPD for allegedly engaging in the “practice of not making a prompt investigation of missing-persons claims of African-Americans, while making a prompt investigation for white individuals.”

What happened to Romona Moore is sick and awful, and there is no telling how a thorough and prompt investigation could have helped her. Perhaps the lawsuit will open the eyes of the NYPD higher-ups who place a higher premium on certain missing persons cases than they do others. Maybe in NYC… But we’ll all still live in a country where missing black women aren’t the right color to make the evening news.