Florida Times-Union
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Although cases of missing, abducted and even murdered children have rocked Northeast Florida for the past year, law enforcement agencies and advocates for children say the state is at the forefront in confronting the issue.
Florida has a history of creating tools and programs law enforcement agents can use in missing-person cases, said Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
The Child Abduction Response Team system that lets law enforcement tackle cases at a moment’s notice was created in Florida in the wake of the 2004 abduction and murder of Carlie Brucia, 11, in Sarasota. The 1981 abduction and murder of Adam Walsh was instrumental in the late U.S. Sen. Paula Hawkins’ introduction of what became the 1982 federal law that allowed the entry of missing-person data into the FBI database. Other laws across the country now have their origins in the 2005 Florida murder of 9-year-old Jessica Lunsford.
“Florida, in many ways borne out of tragedy, has been the leader,” Allen said.
Locally, law enforcement continues to make changes.
In Jacksonville last month, Sheriff John Rutherford overhauled how missing-person cases are handled to give them a higher priority. He said three cases - the disappearance of Haleigh Cummings in Putnam County, the disappearance and slaying of Somer Thompson in Clay County and the shooting death of Makia Coney in Jacksonville - made him decide to speed up response times.
Officers cannot delay responding to the call or swap it without a supervisor’s approval, Undersheriff Frank Mackesy said. He said the changes in how the calls are dispatched have had a negligible impact on responses to other calls.
In St. Johns County, missing-person alerts are one of the most frequent uses of a two-year-old database of phone numbers the Sheriff’s Office uses to alert neighborhoods. Sheriff David Shoar said missing-person calls are evaluated by dispatchers and watch commanders who ratchet up the response depending on that information.
Strategies were revamped by Clay County in 2005 and had an impact in collecting evidence in the Somer case, Sheriff Rick Beseler said. The agency formed a team designed to respond to missing-child cases, ran mock abduction scenarios and developed equipment and protocols, he said.
About a year before the Sept. 22 disappearance of an 11-year-old Jacksonville Beach girl, police there had changed the agency’s methods for dealing with missing persons cases, Sgt. Tom Bingham said.
Jamie Lynn Iovino did not show up for school that day but unlike many runaways, she didn’t leave hints with anyone that she was taking off, Bingham said. That quickly worried investigators who were interviewing her friends and others.
She was eventually found at a department store near Orange Park. Bingham said the new protocols meant that instead of patrol officers conducting an initial investigation then briefing other investigators, detectives were brought in immediately.
The good news is darkened by worry that even as agencies are more prepared, predators are becoming more sophisticated in the techniques that allow them to commit their crimes.
Social networking sites, for example, are prime avenues for luring young people, Mackesy said.
“It’s more of a target-rich environment,” he said. “They have stuff available to them that was not available to them before.”
Two of Jacksonville’s most chilling cases have played out in the past month, with the slaying of 17-year-old Makia Coney and the abduction of 3-week-old Melvin Duclos.
Neither was initially reported as a missing-person case, though worry about Coney’s whereabouts came at about the time the University Christian School student’s body was discovered, Mackesy said.
The baby’s abduction from his family was initially classified as a complaint against the state Department of Children and Families, though that was quickly changed.
Despite the shock value of those cases, statistics from Duval, Clay, Nassau and St. Johns counties show the number of missing persons has dropped over the past three years, as they have state- and nationwide.
Other efforts are trying to cut into another part of the problem - runaways in state care.
In the 20-county area covered by the regional office of the state Department of Children and Families, new tactics are being used to keep children from running from foster and group homes, criminal justice coordinator Todd Raleigh said.
A third of kids 15 to 17 who are in foster care will run away, Raleigh said, and another third “are thinking about it.” Florida law requires case workers make a weekly attempt to find a child who has run away, he said.
To help stem the problem, runaways who are brought back are given a counseling session to let them vent about problems, he said.
Also, chronic runaways in Duval and Nassau counties are offered a $2-a-day increase in their allowance if they stay put. For some, he said, that $60 a month makes a difference.
When Raleigh, a former police officer who handled missing person cases during 10 years with Virginia’s Fairfax County Police Department, joined the state department in 2007 there were between 50 and 60 missing children daily in Jacksonville.
“Today,” he said Wednesday, “I think we are down to three.”
Copyright 2010 Florida Times-Union