The mother of Archie Klatos, the missing teen who took Northeast Ohio by storm, has died.
Police sketch from 2015
This morning, paramedics at Cleveland hospitals confirmed the passing of Peggy Klatos, the co-founder of our website, due to heart failure. She was 46 years old.
Our readers may recall that during the missing person's investigation of Archie Klatos 5 years ago, she held herself personally responsible for his disappearance. "It's my fault he disappeared... I waited until 9:16. It was probably already too late by then." She refers, of course, to waiting until 9:16 PM to call police officers to report her son missing.
“I waited until 9:16. It was probably already too late by then.”
Many during the investigation held Deputy Howard Fields to more scrutiny than Klatos, considering that she and Archie's friend Samantha Hatchins were the co-founders of the Klatos Investigation website to begin with; it was a point of frustration for many that a middle aged mother and a high schooler were doing more than the Cuyahoga County official to solve the case.
Perhaps the greatest disappointment in this news is that part of our pledge is too late; this site pledged itself to finding out what happened to Archie Klatos, to provide a sense of relief and comfort to his loved ones in knowing the truth.
Now, one of them has passed... and will never know the fate of her son.
But her quest lives on.
This site has grown substantially since its founding in 2015; it still presses on, not just in the name of one person but in the name of the hundreds of persons who may eventually be victims of the same fate as Klatos' son.
Through her tragedy, our founder built the ultimate memorial to her son in the form of a website; through her grief, she sought to build a foundation to protect future individuals from suffering the same fate as her son, whether it be human trafficking or any other form of kidnapping. Through this fight for human decency, her son has truly been immortalized as a symbol of hope and a symbol of our collective human mission.
That is the incredible legacy that Peggy Klatos has left us with.
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