Amber Alert: Missing Girl Found Safe

On 26 November 2022, the Amber Alert Task Force marked the 20th Anniversary of the first Missing Broadcast Emergency Response Alert broadcast. Soon after it was commemorated, a new Amber alert was launched for a 13-year-old girl. 

The girl and her brother, an adult, took a lift to go shopping from an unknown man. The stranger left with the girl and the car when her brother went inside to use the restroom. 

The girl was described as 5 foot 5 inches tall and 100 pounds. 

However, the good news is that the blue-eyed teen girl, subjected to the Amber Alert was found safe, with the suspect in custody.

A Safe Recovery Was Made For The Girl Involved In The Amber Alert

The name of the girl is no longer being mentioned anywhere due to privacy concerns. 

The white-blonde girl was last seen around 11 a.m. in the morning at 120th and Melody Drive in Westminster, Colorado, on Tuesday, and an Amber Alert was issued at 8 p.m. in the evening. Within two hours, around 10 p.m. the girl was sound safe, as per the reports of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. 

The Westminster Police Department said they had located the vehicle mentioned in the Amber Alert before the suspect. The car was a stolen 2018 Ford Focus vehicle that he was accused of driving while he allegedly kidnapped the girl. The car has dark tinted windows, black wheels, and a Lyft sticker on the right front-lower windshield with the license plate AQY-Q22. 

However, the authorities found the suspect around 10.30 p.m., and he was taken into custody for investigation. 

The suspect was a 45-year-old man named Bradford Eblen, who is a 250 pounds heavy and 5 feet 11 inches tall man, with brown hair and green eyes. 

Related: Amber Alert:1-Year-Old Girl Dies After Being Stabbed 

The first Amber Alert was broadcasted at 5.35 p.m. on 26 November 2002 in Illinois. This plan is similar in all 50 states of America but was created by the Texas Association of Radio Managers and law enforcement in response to community concerns after a 9-year-old girl was abducted and later found dead in 1996. The Alert was named after Amber Rene Hagerman, who was playing near her home in Arlington, Texas when she was kidnapped. 

The goal of the Amber Alert is to find the missing child safe as soon as possible with public help. For this task, there is a voluntary partnership between law enforcement agencies, broadcasters, the Illinois Press Association, the Illinois Tollway, the Department of Transportation, the National Weather Service, and the Illinois lottery to actively and urgently inform the public about the child abducted. 

The message about the kidnapped child is broadcasted through cell phones, TV, radio, road signs, and other data-enabled devices. 

However, to avoid false alarms, the criteria for issuing an alert are rather strict. 

The AMBER Alert or child abduction emergency alert system (CAE) is also used regionally once; in Hawaii, as Maile Amber Alert in the memory of Levi Frady; in Utah as the Rachael Alert; in Georgia as Levi’s Call in the memory of Levi Frady; and Arkansas as Morgan Nick Amber Alert. 

AMBER is an acronym standing for America’s Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response and has been used to broadcast 118 critical messages since its inception in Illinois. Out of those 118 abducted children, the Alert accounted directly for recovering 67 children and indirectly for 22 more. In total, it has recovered 89 children with community help. 

Since its inception, Amber Alerts have successfully recovered more than 1,100 abducted children nationally, according to the statistics compiled by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.