Maureen Reintjes shared the sadness felt by so many in the Kansas City community when police on Sunday identified a body found two days earlier as that of 13-year-old Jayden Robker, who was reported missing from his home less than a mile away more than a month earlier.

But Reintjes, who now serves as Executive Director of Missouri Missing, an organization that offers support and resources to families of missing Missourians, said she’s also been saddened by the social media comments swirling around Jayden’s case, including accusations leveled at some of his family members.

“Stop. Don’t do that. Just stand by the family,” Reintjes said. “No one knows where the investigation is going to lead, so why hurt somebody needlessly?”

The teen’s body was found Friday in a pond near North Broadway and Northwest Englewood Road. Preliminary autopsy results released Sunday indicated no obvious signs of foul play in Jayden’s death. A death investigation is ongoing.

As everyone awaits the outcome of the final investigation, Reintjes is urging community members to support Jayden’s family.

“When a person goes missing, most of the time you’re dealing with the unknown, so the families have to play both sides of it,” she said of families having to prepare for an outcome of their loved one being found either alive or dead. “And can you imagine the trauma that comes with that?”

“It’s a complicated grief” that checks off “every box of PTSD,” she said.

Jayden went missing the afternoon of Feb. 2. That same evening, his mother, Heather Robker, called police from their home near Northwest Plaza Drive and Northwest Plaza Avenue in the Northland.

“It’s the worst thing ever,” Robker told The Star on Saturday as she awaited the autopsy results that would soon match her son to the body found in the pond.

Robker said on that early February day her son left home on his skateboard to sell some Pokémon cards after he got off the school bus around 2:30 that afternoon. He never returned. She said she contacted police that evening around 10:40 p.m., when she woke up for her night shift and discovered her son missing.

Robker said she’d only spoken to one person who had spotted her son since he left the house that day. A worker at the QuikTrip across the street from their home told her that surveillance footage showed Jayden using the bathroom around 3:30 p.m. before he went east past the Family Dollar, Robker said.

A media release making Jayden’s disappearance public wasn’t posted immediately. A spokesperson with the Kansas City Police Department said this was, in part, because they were waiting on family to provide a current photo of Jayden.

Capt. Corey Carlisle, a spokesman for the KCPD, said despite the “delay in information exchange” in getting the news release out, detectives immediately began investigating the case the night Jayden was reported missing.

It took four days for police to put out a public notice.

Reintjes said many times in her experience, especially with teens and adults, police “sit on it a little bit longer thinking the person is going to show up, and most of the time they do.”

While it appears to Reintjes that police are getting information out faster nowadays, Jayden’s case had obvious delays.

“In my books you should always play to the worst scenario, and rejoice when the best scenario happens,” she said. “But if you play to the worst scenario, you could save a life.”

Reintjes said it’s impossible to know at this point whether or not the timing of the news release could have changed the outcome in the search for Jayden, since his time of death has not yet been made public.

More than a month after he went missing, in the week leading up to the discovery of his body, public efforts to find Jayden finally gained momentum, with dozens of people gathering to participate in a canvass aimed at increasing awareness about Jayden’s disappearance. On Wednesday, the FBI announced it was offering a $5,000 reward for information about his whereabouts.

Days later, his body was found, less than a mile from his home and near the QuikTrip where he was last seen on surveillance video.