How many times in the past years have we heard the sound or seen the symbol and asked, “I wonder who it is and what happened?!”
And just the other morning, I heard the alert and thought to myself, “I wonder how many people know why ‘AMBER ALERT’ is what we call the message.”
1996 was the year! 9-yearold AMBER HAGERMAN, with brown hair and blue eyes, was kidnapped. At a news conference that marked the 25th year anniversary of that tragic event, police again renewed their requests for any tips that could bring answers and possible closure to still grieving family and friends.
Recently, the authorities finally announced that they have “genetic evidence,” which they have been saving these past 25 years, that may aid in solving the case by providing a DNA profile.
Amber and her brother had gone out on a warm winter day to play. He, after a while, tired, and headed back home. She decided to stay and cycle on her own. A few minutes later, a stranger snatched the little girl off her bicycle in a vacated supermarket lot on a day that was bright and drove away with her in a dark (black or blue) pickup truck. It was not long after Christmas, and on January 17 a man walking his dog stumbled upon her body in a creek hardly five miles away from the point of abduction behind an apartment complex. Her throat had been cut; it was determined by forensics that she had died two days after the abduction, and she was positively identified by using a finger print from a school “safety card.”
According to a story I read while perusing several accounts of this event, there was one witness, Jimmie Kevil, who stepped up to say that the little girl “screamed once and was kicking.” He also stated that he remembered him (the abductor) to be a “white or Hispanic male aged 25-40 with a medium build and under 6 feet tall.”
An interesting viewpoint was given by someone (Diana Simone) who had never met Amber but remarked a few days after the funeral, when she supposedly had an idea that she shared with a radio station. “If broadcasters can alert listeners to severe weather, then can’t they do the same thing when a child is abducted?”
She continued with the following: They said that “nobody saw anything. (at 4 p. m. o’clock and thrown into the back of a pick-up) I’m sorry. That is not possible! The problem was not that someone didn’t see them; it’s that they did not know what they were seeing!”
As the “alert” program developed, Simone requested that “it bear Amber’s name.”
The authorities still maintain that they believe some day, some time, the case WILL BE SOLVED, because the type case and the manner in which it happened leads them to speculate that someone had to have seen, heard, or read something that will help!
This event, ever so sad and tragic, did, however, have something good come of it—THE AMBER ALERT SYSTEM, making possible a much quicker and more efficient way of getting out the messages about missing children.
Nine hundred ninetyeight (998) missing children have been found safely as of the summer of 2020, leading Amber’s Mom, Donna Williams, to say that **“She is still taking care of little children like she did her younger brother. I’m very, very proud of my daughter.” And according to Detective Grant Gildon, “The tip that’s going to get us there is still out there!” (Dallas Morning News)**
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