The way Indian River County Undersheriff Jim Harpring sees it, the fact that child-abduction cases are rare here doesn’t matter – because, when it happens, the stakes are too high.
“Very few things we in law enforcement have to do are more important than this,” Harpring said, “and we want to make sure we’re proficient in handling it.”
That’s why 85 law enforcement-related men and women, most of whom carry a badge, gathered recently at the Indian River County Sheriff’s Office campus to attend three days of Child Abduction Response Training (CART) sessions.
Proponents of the U.S. Justice Department-sponsored program say the lessons taught and strategies shared during the training sessions can save lives.
“In cases where children are abducted and the end result is murder, 76 percent of those children are murdered within the first three hours of the abduction, so there’s a very small window,” CART Program Coordinator Derek VanLuchene said during his visit to Vero Beach.
“But the earlier you get organized, the better your chances of recovering the child,” he added. “And while the response starts with local law enforcement, being part of a regional team increases your chances of finding the child – and finding the child alive.”
The law enforcement agencies in this county – the sheriff’s office and municipal police departments – are part of one regional CART team based in Orlando and organized through the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
It was the FDLE, in fact, that launched the CART program in 2005, after the kidnapping, sexual assault and murder of an 11-year-old Sarasota girl, Carlie Brucia, who was abducted while walking home from a friend’s house in February 2004.
Brucia’s killer, Joseph Smith, was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death, but the public outrage in the wake of the grisly crime prompted calls from then-Gov. Jeb Bush and state legislators for the creation of a quick, coordinated police response to child abductions.
“The FDLE began asking: Why can’t we create some program or system that resembles what we do for hurricanes and other emergencies?” explained VanLuchene, who spent 18 years as a law-enforcement officer in Montana. “They came up with the CART concept – a regional, multi-agency, multi-discipline approach to responding to child abductions.
“That’s how it got started, right here in Florida, and as word began to spread, the program started catching on,” he continued. “Now, there are six CART teams in Florida, which has the most of any state, and there are 23 CART teams nationwide. And we’re getting more requests for the sessions.
“I travel around the country and do one or two a month, helping start up new teams and train existing ones.”
Why does VanLuchene do it?
In 1987, when he was 17, his 8-year-old brother, Ryan, was abducted and murdered by a repeat sex offender, who took the boy from the family’s backyard in rural Montana. “Child abduction has touched my life,” he said. “Since then, I’ve devoted a lot of my life to the cause.”
Attendees at the CART sessions also included personnel from St. Lucie County, Martin County and Palm Beach County sheriff’s offices; Vero Beach, Sebastian, Fellsmere, Stuart, St. Petersburg and Washington, D.C. police departments; Indian River Shores Emergency Services; 19th Judicial Circuit State Attorney’s Office; Florida Department of Corrections; and local victims’ advocacy organizations.
Of all the children who annually go missing in the U.S., 15 to 20 percent aren’t found or police don’t know their whereabouts, VanLuchene said, adding that less than 1 percent of the nation’s child abductions are perpetrated by strangers.