Amber glitch

Amber glitch

: An odd sidelight to the horrific story of a mother murdered in Missouri to get her unborn child is the “glitch” in the Amber Alert system, which caused a delay of hours in getting the word out but nonetheless is credited with finding and saving the child:

Complicating the case was a glitch in Missouri’s Amber Alert system, which Espey said kept him from widely spreading word that someone had kidnapped a newborn.

Authorities initially refused Espey’s request to issue the alert because he could not offer descriptions of the newborn or the abductors, Sgt. Keverne McCollum of the Missouri Highway Patrol’s missing-persons unit told The Post.

“We had a live baby, and I thought that should qualify as an Amber Alert,” Espey said. “The information I was getting was that we didn’t have enough information such as hair color, eye color, skin complexion, size and weight.”

Bureaucrats can be deadly.

4 responses to “Amber glitch”

  1. Max Avatar

    The story of this murder and abduction has to be one of the sickest things I have ever heard, but there is one thing about this story that really bugs me. If you have read the various news accounts, you have probably seen this passage or something similar.

    Hours before her arrest, Montgomery and her husband showed off a newborn girl at a restaurant, said Kathy Sage, owner of the Whistle Stop Cafe. Many customers were surprised to hear the infant was only a day old, Sage said. She knew an Amber Alert had been issued for a baby missing from Missouri but did not realize the Montgomerys’ infant was connected until hearing from a reporter Friday. “You read about this stuff,” she said. “It blows you away when it’s here. This stuff is supposed to be in New York City or Los Angeles.”

    Now, I’ve lived in Los Angeles (and Chicago and Washington, DC) and I’ve spent plenty of time in NYC, and last time I checked nobody was ripping babies from wombs in those places, even though, according to this woman, that’s where this is supposed to happen. I think it’s maybe time that people stop assuming that the urban centers of this country are depraved and they start looking in their own back yards.

  2. Mike H. Avatar

    If I’m not mistaken there was a case that was similiar to this one in Chicago. Two black women if I recall correctly. My memory is starting to find alternate paths to ground these days, electrically speaking.

  3. Jim Avatar

    I believe that their was a similiar case in and around Philly-Camden earlier this year.

  4. Max Avatar

    ok, point taken. Apparently, this sort of thing happens everywhere, but the comment that this is “supposed” to happen in our cities still strikes me as a cheap shot and uneccessarily combative.