Safety for Children

8 year old Sandra Cantu is missing. Gone since Friday, mystery to her disappearance abounds. Since authorities are not quite sure what has happened to the girl, an Amber Alert has yet to be issued.

“It is our belief that she is alive and unharmed,” said Sgt. Tony Sheneman of the Tracy, Calif., police, who are coordinating a search for the girl with the FBI. More than 200 volunteers combed the trailer park and surrounding area over the weekend, and the search for the girl is ongoing.

“Until we have evidence that an abduction has occurred, we’ll handle this as a missing person,” Sheneman said.

 

More details are surfacing in the missing child case of Haleigh Cummings. Her brother, who saw Haliegh as she was abducted from her home, reports of a “man dressed all in black” coming into the house and taking Haleigh from her bed.

Crystal Sheffield, the children’s mother, said Haleigh’s father Ronald Cummings, Jr. and her son recounted the same story to her.

"When I see him [Haleigh's brother], all he said is, ‘I want to find my sissy,’ and he said something about somebody in black took her," Sheffield said, according to Central Florida News 13.

"He said they were all dressed in black, but I didn’t question him. I’m not going to question him."

It was not immediately clear when or where Sheffield made this statement. Haleigh apparently vanished Feb. 9 from her father’s Satsuma-area trailer home where she lives with 24-year-old Cummings, his 17-year-old girlfriend Misty Croslin and Haleigh’s little brother Junior, 4.

Family members of a missing central Florida girl are being asked to take polygraph tests in conjunction with the disappearance of the child. Five year old Haleigh Cummings went missing from her own home over a week ago and no promising leads have been found since. At this point in the search for the missing child, law enforcement is moving towards less of a ground search approach and more on following leads.

The Sheriff’s Office said they have received some 500 tips since Haleigh’s disappearance, but said some of those leads have been from people who are trying to get back at someone, for example: "An ex-wife trying to get back at a husband."

Officials said several people have inquired about Chad Reynolds, a sexual predator who disappeared from Marion County. Pape said that although Reynolds is not a person of interest at the present time in Haleigh’s disappearance, they are not ruling anything out and want anybody with information about Reynolds’ whereabouts to call law enforcement.

In the wake of the news that Amber Alerts are being questioned by some, it is great to hear stories when they do actually work, especially in text book fashion. After an Amber Alert was issued for six children who had been taken by their mother from their father’s home, a concerned citizen noticed the Amber Alert and just happened upon the car from the Alert.

A man and woman who were headed to a Laundromat at the shopping center noticed that the green Mazda MPV minivan looked similar to the one described on the news after an Amber Alert was issued for the missing children, Nelson said.

The woman had even written down the van’s license plate number when she heard about the Amber Alert.

When the couple realized it was the same vehicle, the man blocked in the minivan with the couple’s car and yelled to someone at a nearby check-cashing facility to call 911, Nelson said.

All of the children are safe and are in the process of being returned to their father.

Child safety utility InstantAmber linked to an article from the Boston Globe last week about the validity of Amber Alerts and if they actually work. A study from the University of Nevada states that the alerts are not working, maybe even hurting the quest to find missing children.

The lead criminology researcher at the University of Nevada, Timothy Griffin, refers to the Amber Alert system as “crime control theater” and worries that the system may be based more on emotions that actions that may actually work. However, the work of the criminologists only focused on a handful of the Amber Alerts issued, and they also did not have the full report in any of those cases. He still claims that his research is absolute.

Can anything that helps find a missing child be bad?

From WHAM in Rochester, NY:

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children is holding its Ninth Annual Motorcycles for the Missing Ride, a 75-mile poker run through the Finger Lakes region, on July 27.

In the last year alone, NCMEC/NY distributed nearly a million posters of missing children and over 300,000 pieces of prevention education literature.

They have coordinated dozens of child identification programs that enrolled thousands of children and adults and conducted nearly a thousand education programs, drawing over 60,000 participants.

Most importantly, however, they assisted in the recovery of 1,886 children through poster distribution and case assistance.

If you are in the area, be sure and check out this amazing cause helping missing children everywhere.

A happy ending for a missing child over the weekend, in which an Amber Alert was issued and the child recovered within hours. Alexia Bevils, a five year old from Davenport, Illinois, was found thanks to a citizen who had seen the Amber Alert earlier in the evening on television station WQAD.

"The Amber Alert was on TV, running on channel 8," said Kisha Rockwood, Davenport.

"We were watching TV, and the Amber Alert came running across the bottom of the screen," added Zenobia Rockwood. "I programmed the license plate into my cell phone."

"I do feel good," Zenobia Rockwood concluded. "It’s absolutely great, and it’s good for the Amber Alert."

With the recent news that there may be some detractors of the Amber Alert system, it is always a fantastic thing when a child is recovered with the assistance of it.

Parents of a missing child are taking every avenue available to them to find her, including setting up a page for the child on social networking site MySpace. Through the page they are able to post numerous photos of the child, write blog posts about the ongoing search for her, as well as include contact information should anyone have a tip. When a child goes missing and time is of the essence, any way to get the word out with photographs can only help recover the child quicker.
 

Looking for different ways to help locate missing children, several law enforcement agencies are now displaying photographs of missing children on several squad cars within the fleet. Several agencies in Arkansas have started the program, including the Clarksville and Fort Smith Police Departments and the Sequoyah County Sherrif’s Department in Oklahoma will follow suit soon.

Four Fort Smith squad cars were unveiled Tuesday. Twenty of the 30-car fleet are destined to each display pictures of children reported missing from the region. Eighteen will feature two children. Two cars each carry pictures of two local missing children - Morgan Nick who was abducted from an Alma ballpark in June 1995 at age 6, and Tony Allen, a Southside High School sophomore who disappeared from his Fort Smith home in 1978. Their pictures depict them as they looked at the time of they went missing and as they would look now, using age-progression technology.

While Amber Alerts are the most widely known way to help find missing children, the local efforts by these law enforcement agencies will go a long way to help.