BOISE — Ada County law enforcement agencies are banding together to help combat a problem that isn’t necessarily common but is of critical importance when the moment arises: child abduction.
Last week, personnel from the Boise, Garden City and Meridian police departments, the Ada County Sheriff’s Office, and Idaho State Police gathered for CART – a national entity also known as the Child Abduction Response Team training program. Training sessions took place at the Boise Police Department in west Boise and revolved around response to endangered, missing or abducted children and how all entities can work together as a specialized team to combat a potential case in its infancy stages.
Chuck Fleeger, an instructor with CART, said a child abduction scenario is “high critically and very low frequency.”
“Things that need to be responded to appropriately, but fortunately does not happen a lot,” he said.
Often, when a child goes missing, they turn up shortly thereafter.
Josiah Ransom, lieutenant in the Special Victims Unit with Boise police, said actual abductions in the immediate area are “very minimal to few.”
“It may turn out just to be that they’re at their friend’s house playing Xbox and mom didn’t know,” Ransom said.
But in those instances when an abduction does happen, it’s often the moments immediately following that are vital in bringing them to safety, Ransom said.
“We want to go into it thinking of the worst-case scenario, so that way we don’t miss stuff on the front end,” Ransom said. “Those first couple of minutes or hours are crucial, and if there’s evidence that needs to be collected and we’re not trained on what that evidence is, we could miss that, which could then turn into an unsolved case of a child that’s been missing for nine years. We don’t want that.”
With that in mind, the CART training is an effort to mobilize various Ada County agencies to get in front of a possible case.
Aside from the police departments, Fleeger said that dispatchers, victim assistance, prosecutors, resource managers, and search and rescue members are also part of the initiative.
“This is aligning that help in advance. The sheer number of personnel involved in large-scale searches, but also in law enforcement investigative processes, doing what we call a door-to-door canvas, that takes a lot of people and it takes a lot of time,” Fleeger said. “The whole time that all this is going on, 911 is still ringing in the dispatch centers, there’s still traffic crashes going on. This is that supplement. It’s planning for the worst-case scenario in advance, and hope that you never have to use that plan.”
Additionally, Ransom said community support and channeling and directing that support is part of the CART model as well. Often during a potential abduction, community members want to be part of the effort, and getting them synergized with law enforcement’s approach is important, Ransom said.
“We just want to make sure people respond in a controlled way. We’re going to need the help,” he said. “We can’t police without the community. We need them to do it in the correct way.”
Fleeger, who is a retired law enforcement officer out of Texas, said in his experience the program can be particularly beneficial for smaller agencies or those dealing with a high volume of work.
Generally, he said, an agency has its own policies, procedures and resources in place for such circumstances. Once they tap out on those resources, then they typically contact outside agencies for assistance.
With CART, he said, once a potential abduction call is received, those additional resources are immediately in place and available at the front end of the investigation process.
“You’ve had the conversation before you’re meeting around the command post,” Fleeger said.
Big-picture training last week was to establish baseline requirements and get buy-in from all involved, Ransom said.
Additionally, the Ada County CART team looked to establish structure, policy and procedures; the roles of various individuals in the operation such as incident commander, point of contact for media, and people to oversee topics such as logistics and finance; case studies throughout the week to show where the trainings succeeded and/or fell short; and a tabletop exercise at the end where the group ran through a role-playing exercise.
CART came to the Boise area after BPD Sgt. Cory Turner attended a CART training session in Canyon County and thought it would be useful for his agency as well. From there, the ball started rolling to bring it to the BPD and surrounding agencies.
Ransom said while potential abduction cases are rare locally, he pointed to a handful over the years that have impacted the Treasure Valley and Idaho:
• Robert Manwell , a 9-year-old boy who was beaten and tortured by his mother’s boyfriend in Boise and eventually died from the abuse in 2009.
• DeOrr Kunz , a 2-year-old who disappeared while on a family camping trip in eastern Idaho’s Lemhi County in 2015.
• Michael Vaughan , the 5-year-old Fruitland boy who went missing from his family home in 2021.
Ransom said after last week’s training that the agencies could spring into action as soon as Monday if circumstances required it. He said the Ada County police departments already have good collaboration working together, making the program a natural fit.
He added that if another police agency outside of Ada County or the Treasure Valley needed assistance in a potential abduction case, Ada County CART would be willing to provide support and take action.
CART’s website says that the mission of its AMBER Alert Training and Technical Assistance Program is to safely recover missing, endangered, or abducted children through the coordinated efforts of law enforcement, media, transportation, and other partners by using training and technology to enhance response capacities and capabilities and increase public participation.
Fleeger said he has helped establish CART programs throughout the United States, including in Florida, Tennessee, Wisconsin and Northern California.
He said that over 300,000 children are entered into a national database as missing every year, and that most are found quickly and safely. He added, however, that between 60 and 150 child abduction homicides occur annually.
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