Reuniting Families After Katrina
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by Larry Magid
Sept. 15, 2005Listen to Larry Magid's CBS News interview with NCMEC's Ernie Allen
For more than 20 years, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has been helping law enforcement find children who have been abducted by strangers or family members while also working to stop sexual exploitation of children. Suddenly, the center has a new mandate. At the request of the Justice Department, the center is now running a hotline and a Web page to help find and identify both children and adults who are missing or separated as a result of Hurricane Katrina.
First, a couple of disclosures: I serve as an unpaid member of the center’s board of directors so I’m not claiming any journalistic objectivity. Also, CBS News has partnered with NCMEC to help publicize the Katrina Missing Person’s Hotline and the names and photos of some of the victims that are still missing.
When it comes to the missing, the numbers are staggering. As of Sept. 15, the center had answered 16,637 calls — 2,709 children were reported missing with 701 cases that have been recovered or otherwise resolved. That still leaves more than 2,000 kids unaccounted for. The center is aware of 7,205 missing adults with 943 cases resolved which means that more than 6,200 adults are still missing.
The organization is encouraging people to call its hotline at 888-544-5475 or visit its Katrina missing person’s Web page.
Ernie Allen, CEO of NCMEC, said that the kids who are missing are not a result of parental neglect but just the opposite. “These parents were willing to sacrifice everything to save their children … when the helicopter arrives on the roof of the flooded apartment building and there are three seats and you’ve got a mom and four kids, she’s not going to get on that helicopter and leave the other two so it’s the children that are getting put into the helicopter and the boats.”
Allen said that during the evacuation of the Superdome “there were literally parents passing their children hand to hand over the heads of other people to get the children on the buses first.”
In addition to staffing the hotline and posting pictures on its Web site, the center has dispatched its “Team Adam” force of former police officers to the region to try to locate missing people. “Where there are no pictures, you try to create pictures so we have sent our 'Team Adam' staff into the shelters with digital cameras to take the pictures of the left-behind and the missing.”
Even though the National Center has many technology companies among its corporate sponsors, Allen says that much of its success in the Katrina cases are a result of old fashioned “shoe leather” detective work. “We reunited a mother with her 5-year-old. The 5-year-old was in a shelter in Baton Rouge, the mom was in a shelter in Texas. We basically traced a cell phone that wasn’t working and identified who she was. We found a friend of the mother who said they thought she had been moved to one of the evacuee hotels in Houston so we had a staff member call every hotel in Houston, Texas.”
Allen is very supportive of the work that organizations are doing on the Web to help find missing people but says that there is a difference between those sites and what the center is trying to do.
“The one real difference is that most of those resources, while positive, are relatively passive," he says. "You provide information and hope that someone else will come to the site and sort of self connect.” Allen says that the center is trying to use its Web site to ”make it an active search … using a cadre of retired law enforcement officials who are taking the calls and trying to identify the one key piece of information that we can purse to find the missing person and link them with their families.”
As for how long the search will continue, “the search will never stop until we know where the missing person is or we know with certainty what happened to them.”
