Let the police do their job. A missing child is safe, but the story is unclear | Opinion
No matter what you may have heard, we don’t know the full details of what happened on June 14 when a toddler went missing near a Wendy’s in Tacoma.
The most important facts we do have: two-year-old Delilah Everett is safe, unharmed and returned to her parents.
But despite comments from the girl’s family and rumors about the situation, we don’t know the intentions of the man who found her wandering alone and eventually took her to his home. The Pierce County Prosecutor’s office has not announced whether it will press charges against him.
There’s also no reason at this time to call the police response, which included a team of child-abduction specialists, excessive. According to the police’s breakdown of events, the department’s decision to issue an Amber Alert was exactly what led to them finding the child.
Seconds matter when a child is missing. When a police department doesn’t issue an Amber Alert and tragedy strikes, families and the public are left with horrible questions of what might have been prevented. In Tacoma, a police spokesperson was found in violation of department policy when he failed to issue an Amber Alert in the 2007 case of a 12-year-old girl who was abducted and murdered.
More recently, the Washington State Patrol explained that they couldn’t issue an Amber Alert for three girls whose father was late in returning them from a custody visit. They instead issued an Emergency Missing Persons Alert, which doesn’t require phone users to dismiss the alert and sidesteps a feature that makes it much more likely for the public to see it. The girls were found murdered two days later. Authorities are still searching for the girls’ father Travis Decker.
Reading through the timeline of events provided by the Tacoma Police Department of the recent search for the two-year-old, the response seems textbook. The child’s mother reported her missing around 9:30 a.m. Not long after, an employee at the Wendy’s called the police and said a child was with a man who asked around for the girl’s parents and then left the area with her.
According to the police department’s release, they knew from that point that the man’s intentions could be benign. But they couldn’t be sure, and they still had to find the girl. No other information was forthcoming from the public. Because the parents didn’t recognize the man from surveillance footage, the police department called in a team that specialized in child abduction cases. By 11:42 a.m., they had issued the Amber Alert.
In less than 10 minutes, the police department said, the Amber Alert yielded a tip about the identity of the man who took the girl. About 15 minutes after that, they located the girl at the man’s home.
The child’s father has said online and in interviews that he is thankful to the man who took his daughter for taking care of her, and that he believes the man’s intentions were benign. That’s the father’s prerogative, and I genuinely hope he’s correct — even if the man’s judgment in taking her home and not contacting the police is questionable.
For what it’s worth, I also think online commenters criticizing the parents over the girl’s disappearance are getting ahead of themselves. You can’t know whether you’d be able to stop a toddler from giving you the slip if you weren’t there.
We just don’t know everything that happened yet. The Tacoma Police Department took the man into custody and interviewed him after finding the girl. The girl’s father said he told law enforcement he doesn’t want charges pressed.
The department said it will release information about what its officers learned in interviews with the man and his friends and family after the prosecutor makes a call on charges.
