Days after an AMBER alert went out from Evangeline Parish regarding a missing three-year-old child, Communications Supervisor for Evangeline Parish 911/Office of Emergency Preparedness Chasessica Basco explained how the process works with such alerts.
Basco explained the process begins with an agency such as 911 or the local sheriff’s office contacting Louisiana State Police “once you determine there is just cause for an AMBER alert.”
According to Basco, there are certain criteria for just cause to be determined. One of the criteria is that it cannot be a custody matter.
The recent case here in the parish, as Basco explained, met the criteria even though the child was taken by her father “because it was deemed necessary that it wasn’t just a custody fight and that the child was in imminent danger.”
“The hardest part is to determine if it’s something that should be entered as an AMBER alert or not because it has to meet the specific criteria,” she continued.
The case involved the Evangeline Parish Sheriff Office contacting State Police about three-year-old Paizley Ann Fontenot who was taken by her biological father Sunday, December 9, around 12:35 p.m. The AMBER alert was issued eight hours later, and the child was recovered shortly before midnight in Mississippi. The father was taken into custody and extradited back to Evangeline Parish to face charges of kidnapping.
After just cause is determined and State Police is contacted, Basco explained State Police faxes a form to the agency, such as the sheriff’s office in the case locally, “to be filled out in its entirety and to be sent back.” She added, “You also have to send a really good detailed description of the vehicle. Usually it’s a fairly quick process just depending on the circumstances.”
Basco said, once the AMBER alert is issued, “an alert goes out every 30 minutes for two or three hours until the child is found.”
The phone alerts in such a situation are funded, as Basco said, through taxes and other charges on cell phone bills.
“It’s a good system, and it works whenever it’s done correctly,” Basco concluded about the alerts. “It saved a lot of lives so far.”
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TONY MARKS Associate Editor