BY JIMMIE FERGUSON
Herald Staff Writer
BELTON — When a 7-year-old Marlboro Elementary student was abducted
in April 1997, getting key law enforcement agencies and the media notified was a
nightmare, a dispatcher with the Bell County Communication Center said.
Thanks to technology, the Bell County Communications Center now can get
that information disseminated to the right sources in less than a minute, said Pam Smith,
the communication center’s “expert,” who installed and tested the program
called, “Abduction Central Alert.”
“When we put it up to a test, everybody we wanted to notify was
notified within 22 seconds,” Smith said.
Time is important when a child is abducted, said Timothy Leverenz,
director of Bell County Communications. “And this is another tool, another technology
that will get the word out almost immediately.”
Leverenz said the center will activate the notification process
immediately after it is notified by a law enforcement agency of a missing child.
“Each law enforcement agency may have time restrictions on when they
consider a child missing, but as soon as they tell us, there is no time restriction on
us,” the commu-nications director said.
“We have tested it but haven’t had the opportunity to use it in
a realistic situation yet,” Leverenz said.
The computer software program was provided to Bell County at no cost by
the Child Alert Foundation of Dushore, Pa., Leverenz said. The one-time registration fee
of $250 was paid by the Texas members of the Southern Cruiser’s Riding Club.
Before the program was received Feb. 6, Leverenz said there was no program
in the county.
“We had nothing,” Leverenz said. "Every law enforcement
agency did its own thing. It was a mixed-bagged, unorganized program.”
Theoretically, Leverenz said the center has been informed by each law
enforcement agency which agencies and media they want notified in the event of a child
abduction.
So, if an incident does occur, the communications center will need only
the information and photograph on the missing child, Leverenz said.
“We will plug that information into the computer and send it to the
foundation in Pennsylvania,” he said. “Because the contacts have already been
designated, the Child Alert Foundation will then immedi-ately send that information out
via fax, e-mail, pager or however the contacts wanted to be notified to everyone on our
list within a 100-mile radius of our location. And at the same time, an internal Web site
is updated with the child’s picture.”
Smith said this information will include police information; suspect and
vehicle information, if available, and contact information.
“So, within a matter of a minute, this information is out to the
media, on the Web site and the photograph is available for anybody who wants to find out
anything about this abduc-tion,” Leverenz said. “That’s the major advantage
— more people notified quicker.”
Contact Jimmie Ferguson
at jferguson@kdhnews.com
(Copyright 2000 - The Killeen Daily
Herald Winner of Texas Associated Press Managing Editors' Awards Herald publisher
elected to The Associated Press Board of Directors - May 2000)
Graphic of Newspaper Story
Part 1 - Part 2
CAF would like to thank Timothy J. Leverenz for supplying us
with the news.
Mr. Leverenz is the Director of Bell County 911 Communications Center
Read his letter of advocating on CAF
