Confused
When Samuel returned on his own, Lisa became concerned for her older son. However, Lisa Smith is an immigrant from Haiti, and so she wasn’t fully familiar with the law. Doing the only thing she could think of, she notified child services that her son was missing, but failed to notify the police.
It was later learned that being an immigrant, Lisa was hesitant to approach the police, but in hindsight, she knows this would have been the right thing to do. Notifying child services wasn’t much of help, but Lisa didn’t know what else to do.