No Mobile Amber Alert For Kidnapped Teen: Authorities Tell Why
DETROIT (WWJ) - Some have questioned why they never received a cell phone notification of the Amber Alert for Deontae Mitchell, as they have in other missing child cases.
"All we had was a older, black Impala with a loud exhaust," said Michigan State Police Sgt. Sarah Krebs, not enough to put out a mobile Amber Alert.
She says they would have needed a license plate number to make that happen.
An Amber Alert for Mitchell was issued Wednesday morning. He was last seen around 10:30 p.m. Tuesday near Nino's Market on East Warren, between Outer Drive and Alter Road on the city's east side.
Mitchell's body was discovered Thursday morning in an overgrown field off Harper and Baldwin, in the area of Van Dyke and I-94.
"You have the people who are not a fan of being woken up at night - they'd be even less of a fan if we woke them up to tell them to start looking for a black Impala," says Krebs, "because that's really all the information we had on that case."
Still, she says the information about the missing boy was on billboards and social media.
Krebs says this is the second Amber Alert this year that's ended with the death of a child.
The criteria for issuing an AMBER Alert according to Michigan State Police
- An endangered missing person under 17 years of age is reported to law enforcement and one or more of the following circumstances exist:
- The child suffers from a severe mental or physical disability that greatly impairs the child's ability to care for him/herself.
- The child is a victim of stranger or acquaintance kidnapping. Stranger kidnapping is defined as a child being taken against his/her will by a stranger. Acquaintance kidnapping is defined as a child being taken against his/her will by an acquaintance of the child or the child's family.
- The child is in the company of a person who has a confirmed criminal history of child abuse/neglect, sexual assault, domestic assault, a crime involving the victimization of children, or has made statements of intent to harm the missing child, or is suicidal.
- The child has been abducted by a non-custodial parent whose parental rights have been terminated.