Audio clip
Kristen Helm
One of parents’ biggest fears is that their child might be victimized on the Internet, including being targeted by a pedophile in chat rooms or on MySpace.com, or used as subject of pornographic photos shared on the Web.
But Thursday when a Georgia child went missing, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children used the Internet and other mediums to help find the 4-year-old girl who had been taken from her North Georgia home.
Those groups issue Amber Alerts on sites such as MySpace in hopes that the popularity of online social networking will help law enforcement track down missing and endangered kids, authorities said.
“We embrace as many forms of communication as we can,” said Bob Hoever, who coordinates the Amber Alert list for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. “We are constantly looking for organizations with large contact lists that we can alert when we have a missing child.”
Thursday’s alert went out to local media and Tennessee Department of Transportation electronic road signs, the more traditional methods. Mr. Hoever said the message also was sent to cell phones as a text message and posted on Yahoo!, MSN and MySpace.
MySpace users in North Georgia and Tennessee who logged in Tuesday evening saw a message that alerted them that Madison Kerr had been abducted by her father, John J. Jones, who did not have custody rights. He was a convicted sex offender, TBI spokeswoman Kristin Helm said.
After the TBI transmitted the Amber Alert, it took about an hour and a half for TBI and U.S. Marshals Service agents to find Mr. Jones and his daughter. Tips came in that he was in the Murfreesboro, Tenn., area.
Since Tennessee began using the alert system in 1996, 48 announcements have been sent out. All but one child has been recovered, Ms. Helm said.
Ms. Helm said the program has been successful because the public, local media and law enforcement work together.
The MySpace alerts, which began a year ago, are sent to users based on their geographic location. Since it was likely Mr. Jones drove through Chattanooga while fleeing authorities, this area received the alert.
The Web messages appear in a small text box at the top of a user’s portfolio. The user can click on the box for more information, including a photo of the missing child and a description of the suspect.
The Amber Alert program is administered by the U.S. Department of Justice, but the Center for Missing and Exploited Children distributes the alerts to a variety of sources, including the Web sites, Mr. Hoever said.
“There are about 120 agencies that participate in the program,” Mr. Hoever said. “The big companies, MySpace, Yahoo, etc. don’t like to deal with all those groups. We collect the information and send it to those companies in one standardized format.”
ON THE WEB
Sign up for mobile text message Amber Alerts at www.wirelessamberalerts.org.
Adam Crisp covers education issues for the Times Free Press. He joined the paper's staff in 2007 and initially covered crime, public safety, courts and general assignment topics. Prior to Chattanooga, Crisp was a crime reporter at the Savannah Morning News and has been a reporter and editor at community newspapers in southeast Georgia. In college, he led his student paper to a first-place general excellence award from the Georgia College Press Association. He earned ...
