TYLER, Texas — If you feel like your phone has not stopped buzzing from AMBER Alerts, you might not be far off.
Sixteen children have been abducted in Texas since the coronavirus pandemic began. It is a sharp increase from years past, but experts say the virus is not necessarily to blame.
“For the particular AMBER Alerts,” Leemie Kahng-Sofer, a program manager with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, said, “we haven’t seen, necessarily, anything where COVID-19 or anything having to do with the restrictions really contributed to the taking event.”
Governor Greg Abbott declared a state of disaster due to coronavirus on March 13. Since then, the state has issued 13 AMBER Alerts for 16 abducted children. During the same time period last year, it issued seven AMBER Alerts encompassing eight children. In 2018, it issued six AMBER Alerts during that time frame with nine children involved.
“At least, the ones in Texas we’ve recently seen, a lot of them are family abduction-related,” Kahng-Sofer explained. “So it’s a non-custodial parent who takes the child.”
While there is no proof coronavirus is a factor in the increase in AMBER Alerts, Kahng-Sofer said it has been a factor in several runaway cases recently.
“There were youth that were really frustrated by the social distancing restrictions of having to stay at home, their inability to see friends, family, significant others,” she mentioned. “And then we’ve seen where there are youth centers or group homes that have been shut down due to pandemic concerns. And, therefore, this leads to the child being placed elsewhere. That then prompts them to leaving that facility.”
Of the 16 children kidnapped in Texas during the pandemic, two were found dead while 14 were rescued and returned home. Kahng-Sofer said coronavirus has not had any impact on law enforcement’s ability to find missing children or capture their kidnappers. While most Texans still are not going out as much as they used to, she urged them to lean on their increased use of social media to help solve those cases.
“Keep your ear to the ground, your eyes focused,” she said. “To the extent that you’re out, you see something, and you get an alert, then, you see the child or the abductor or the vehicle they may be in, to report that right away.”
The AMBER Alert system was launched in 2003 to help law enforcement agencies in Texas track children who were abducted and put in danger.