We cannot be forgiven for what happened to Relisha Rudd 10 years ago.

Because everybody knew.

Everybody knew her family was a mess.

Everybody knew she missed a lot of school.

Everybody knew the abandoned hospital that warehoused up to 600 of our city’s most vulnerable children was filthy, dangerous, rat-infested and not a home.

Everybody knew that the janitor who took her into a hotel room on one of the last days she was seen alive was offering $20 bills, Goldfish crackers and a night at his house to a lot of little girls at the family shelter.

Everybody knew that children — especially the ones with brown skin and parents without big jobs — were not a government priority. And they still aren’t.

The story of Relisha — in case you weren’t around a decade ago — dominated the news in the weeks and months after she went missing, when the details jolted and horrified us.

She was 8 years old when the janitor took her from the shelter. It was something he tried with other girls, promising a night at his home with his wife, away from the noise, drugs, guns, sex and filth that were everyday life in that place, a shelter resident told me in 2016. The janitor killed his wife, then himself, and Relisha hasn’t been seen since.

Television cameras zoomed in as officers fanned out to do grid searches for a body. There were candlelight vigils and somber news conferences. Psychics weighed in with their visions, and online groups played the Where-Is-Relisha game.

Relisha's disappearance deserves as much attention as a Malaysian jetliner

I was there alongside everyone, tromping through the lotus flowers at Kenilworth Gardens, where the janitor killed himself, scanning the swamp for any sign of one of Relisha’s pink boots. My kids were around her age at that time, and it hit home.

Relisha got white Ford Bronco-level obsession. Briefly.

And then, it was over. She’s still missing.

Every so often, officials release an age-progression image of her, showing what she may look like at 12, 14, 16, guessing if she’d be wearing her hair in braids or loose, whether the sadness in her 8-year-old eyes would still be there.

The shelter has been bulldozed, swank condos have been built around the area. Homeless children were moved to aging hotels, then to smaller shelters built throughout the city.

I began writing about the wretched shelter in 2010, before Relisha’s disappearance, when social worker Jamila Larson took a group of teens living there on a day trip to the White House and a fancy restaurant.

It was jarring to see the horror show they were supposed to call a home. I remember the dirty hallway tiles, the broken glass and trash in the lot where children played.

“There is no longer a recreation room — that was filled just last week with three more families. And the cafeteria looks like an evacuation center after a natural disaster, with rows of cots. Last week, some of the families began sleeping in the hallways,” I wrote in a column four years before the city gasped at the conditions Relisha tried to escape — with the janitor.

Larson began one of the best nonprofits in the city, the Playtime Project, and got tutors and volunteers to come in and help the kids get the tiniest taste of the childhood they were supposed to be having. She even had an astronaut come talk to them and she testified relentlessly before the city council to detail all the problems she saw at the shelter every day.

Eight years old and homeless — there are hundreds of children like Relisha in D.C.

The leaders of the city knew.

We spoke with some of the folks who knew Relisha back then, at school or at the shelter. Many of them are driven by regrets and memories of her story.

“When I open an attendance record and see consecutive days missed, there is an instant tightening of the chest,” said LaBoné Workman, the elementary school social worker who was the first one to sound the alarm that Relisha was in grave danger. He found out Relisha was in trouble after she missed more than 30 days of school and he tracked down the person listed as a doctor taking care of her. It wasn’t a doctor, it was the janitor.

When he sees those absences, he immediately calls the parents, the contacts, anyone who can tell him more about the child, and he does it with even more urgency now.

Larson, who has been dedicated to kids like Relisha for decades, still has the smiling girl’s sad-eyed photo up in her office.

“Relisha’s village let her down,” she said. “We all let her down, because we were collectively part of that village. In her honor, we’ve got to do everything we can to build a village that can be there for more children and families who need us.”

These haunted people are still doing that work, in the schools, programs and clinics, helping with the kids who need them most. Relisha is their lodestar as they encounter every new kid in need. For them? Grace and forward motion.

We need to examine Relisha's life, not just her disappearance

But for the rest of us?

There is no forgiveness for a society that accepts Relisha’s life as normal. Because Relisha isn’t just one kid.

The number of homeless children in our nation is growing.

In 2023, a year when our nation’s economy grew by 3.1 percent, stock markets rip-roared, home sellers were making bank and Pew surveys showed that the world was beginning to get good vibes from the United States again, families with children made up nearly a third of the nation’s homeless population.

One of the most important safety nets for our nation’s children — our schools — logged 14.7 million students who were chronically absent in the 2021-22 school year. That means a third of students missed at least 20 days of the school year, often because of illness, technology problems, transportation and child-care issues, according to numbers from Attendance Works, a nonprofit that tackles this problem.

Our nation’s childhood poverty rates have grown by more than 50 percent since the 1970s — those rates are among the highest of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) nations, according to the Learning Policy Institute. And the highest percentage of kids are eligible for free or reduced meals at school since we began tracking those numbers decades ago.

And yet, our nation’s leaders are fighting about saying “gay” in classrooms. They are telling teachers what books kids should be allowed to read rather than putting the health, housing and nutrition of our youngest Americans first. Youth crime is talked about at city council hearings and on neighborhood chat groups far more than their well-being.

Relisha’s story isn’t just about D.C. 10 years ago.

There are millions of children in the United States who are as vulnerable now as Relisha was back then.

And we can’t claim ignorance. Everybody knows.