The Conway community came together to canvass neighborhoods for leads about a missing 14-year-old girl Sunday afternoon, and residents say they’ve done so in the absence of police action.

The canvassing came after parties made weekend searches for Tanvi Marupally through Petit Jean and Woolly Hollow State Parks, which returned no leads.

Residents met for canvassing assignments at Northside Church of Christ, which is connected to Davis Street, where Marupally was last seen walking north Jan. 17, according to the Conway Police Department’s Facebook posts.

Jenny Wallace, a stay-at-home mom, said Marupally befriended her daughter when she was a new student at Conway Junior High School.

Wallace said she’s been organizing the searches with a lot of help.

“I have noticed that a lot of things have gone undone that should have been done in the first week or two of her missing, and so I’ve just tried to make as much noise as possible about it, to try to get the community to bridge that gap,” she said.

Wallace said, “Her parents have come against so many obstacles that … many in the community wouldn’t have come against if it had been our child.”

“Our biggest thing right now is just trying our hardest to get anything on camera,” Wallace said. “That’s why we would love a press conference, love for the police department to beg the community to watch their videos, because that is our best chance of putting together clues, and we just haven’t had any luck with that,” she said.

Gary Logan, an organizer and former Conway principal, said, “Just to think that we’re at the three-week point, and then we’re just now having mass searches. Not what we would think in our town, but it’s the harsh reality of where we are, so we just deal with it.”

Logan said the community would like to see more from the police.

“We understand that there’s only a finite amount of resources, but most certainly we would like to see more urgency and more of a response,” Logan said.

Logan first learned that Marupally was missing on Facebook, where posts about her from local residents and the Conway Police Department have been liked and shared hundreds of times in an effort to increase awareness.

Marilyn Chapman, a Conway Junior High School librarian, helped assign volunteers streets to canvass.

“I’m grateful for the community. I was starting to feel hopeless, kind of, but then everybody showed up and it kind of made me feel rejuvenated,” Chapman said.

They used a large map of Conway and highlighter markers to keep track of areas already searched.

The organizers also provided volunteers with stacks of missing posters to hand out and hang around Conway and scripts to go door-to-door.

Community members donated water and snacks for the canvassers, and the Northside Church of Christ was open for volunteers to pray or use the restroom.

Wallace said the community should pressure the police to respond more.

“I feel like there is more being done now, but we’re coming into week three,” Wallace said. “She’s a missing teen. She’s a 14 year old, and she’s missing and endangered. I wish that we could focus on that instead of insisting she’s run away.”

“I also feel like there’s no police presence today helping,” she said.

Wallace said Marupally ran away before, but only for a day.

“This is a totally different situation … and it’s winter. She has no cellphone, she’s 14, she has no social media.”

“I have been told by the police that the chief has said there will be no press conference for this child, and that’s very perplexing to make a statement on that … for a case that is active, for a community that’s begging to help bring this child home.”

Wallace, gesturing to the street behind her, said, “Davis was the last street she was seen on. The railroad tracks are right down here. We didn’t know, did she cross the railroad, or did she go on either side of the railroad?”

Wallace said she wanted to know if a nearby apartment complex’s cameras had seen Marupally.

“I called them and asked about the footage 13 days in. No one had known. No police officer had spoken to them. It is the very next camera she would have been caught on,” she said, adding that the camera’s angle was too low to show someone walking by the tracks anyway.

“When I asked the police about that, he just said, we just must have missed that. But I asked him also, then tell me how many videos have been viewed. How many Ring videos of residences have been viewed? And he said zero,” Wallace said.

Wallace said she’s received hundreds of Facebook messages offering to help and that the community’s been amazing.

“I raised money to put up billboards and buy banners, and we were able to afford two billboards, like 20 banners, some magnets. But, then probably six to seven more people have donated digital billboards, just free,” Wallace said.

She said, “The community has really risen, and I think it’s because they feel like, why has enough not been done?”