The boy was born with fetal alcohol syndrome, which impairs his judgment, West said. At the time he vanished, he was a seventh-grader in special-education classes at Wai'anae Intermediate School. The 'Ewa Beach shelter, which human services officials would not identify by name, was Akila's fourth foster home since the state took custody of him, West said.

Police had not classified Akila as a missing person as of yesterday morning. The Juvenile Services Detail officer assigned to the case did not return calls for comment.

But West said the officer has made several trips to 'Ewa Beach and Nanakuli to interview relatives, at one point responding to an anonymous tip to human services that Akila was with his parents. It turned up nothing, she said.

"I decided to see what I could find on my own," West said.

The home was empty when she went the first time, in February, but in March she found two sleeping women and an angry pit bull.

The women said they had no idea where Akila was.

"Then one of them said, 'Oh, he ran away because he didn't like the home you had him in,' " West said. "That made me think they had been in contact with him."

Nothing else came of the meeting, she said, so officials decided to ask for the public's help. Someone might have seen the boy and not realized something was wrong.

"How would people know he is missing if we can't tell them?" she said.

The situation, with the boy missing for nearly six months, is appalling, said state Rep. Dennis Arakaki, D-30th (Moanalua, Kalihi Valley, 'Alewa).

"Something is wrong and something is broken," Arakaki said of the state's child protection system. "We need to find a solution."

Akila had been living in a state-licensed emergency shelter in 'Ewa Beach that provides care for children awaiting placement in a foster home, West said.

He went trick-or-treating with other children from the shelter, West said yesterday. When he did not come home, police were called shortly after midnight and Akila was classified as a juvenile runaway, West said.

But Akila does not fit the profile for typical runaways, West said. Most runways are older — 15 or 16 — and return after several days of rebellious freedom, she said.

"For kids this young, it is more rare," she said. "And especially for him to be gone as long as he has. It is a little scary."

Because children in foster homes are protected by confidentiality laws, human services officials must ask a Family Court judge to open the files so the case can reach a wider public audience.

West first wrote to Family Court Judge Marilyn Carlsmith seeking this action on Dec. 28, 2004. But the agency needed to file an official request with the judge, so the state attorney general's office did so on Jan. 26.

Carlsmith approved the release of Akila's story on Feb. 8, said Marsha Kitagawa, a spokeswoman for the judiciary.

"Just because I write a letter to the judge directly doesn't mean it will get before a judge," Kitagawa said. "There are legal procedures and a process that has to be followed."

But for reasons that are still unexplained, the judge's order was not filed — and therefore made official — until March 8. Kitagawa said it is the responsibility of the attorney making the request to get the document filed and the attorney general's office could have done this as early as Feb. 8.

Mary Anne Magnier, supervisor of the family law division in the attorney general's office, disagreed with Kitagawa.

"There is no step where it is returned to the attorney general's office for filing," Magnier said. "They sign it and file it all in one step."

Magnier could not immediately explain, though, why it took four weeks for the case to be filed.

Lillian Koller, director of the human services department, said new administrative rules, approved in December allow her agency to bypass the Family Court. In December, the department added a confidentiality chapter to its administrative rules that defines when it can open a case for public review, Koller said.

"Clearly, under our new rules, we do have the ability to make the disclosure for missing children," Koller said yesterday. "It is one of the examples in our rules where there is a state interest."

But she called this "unchartered territory."

"These are brand-new rules and we haven't done training on them," Koller said. "Part of what we will need to do, as this case shows, is retrain and do the outreach, internally and externally, about the opportunities to access information."