I was in Target with one of the Sysmidgets. A was doing one of his favorite things, playing on the demo video games. I was standing about 15 feet away from him, in the same aisle. Over the intercom, I heard an announcement, a "Code Adam" for a missing boy in a black coat. Guess what color coat A had on. Within minutes, there were easily 10 staffers on either end of our aisle. "This is my Dad," A said. And I stood there with my hands on his shoulders. Took them a few minutes, but they found the boy they were looking for. He'd just wandered off. I saw him with what looked like his Grandma. She'd seen the staffers approaching me and A, and told her boy about it.

I've had the guys get away from me in public. One of the twins got away by jumping down a slide at a Disney resort. I seriously had never been more frightened in my life. It took almost five minutes to find him. It felt like hours.

Here's an article on Code Adam from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

I am extremely happy that the Target employees acted the way that they did. I'm glad that this type of response is becoming more common. I don't care that they suspected me, becuase it would have been easy enough to clear up.

Now, for fairness' sake, I have to say that I've been troubled by some of the milk carton missing kid stuff. I'm a past participant in the family court system, and I know that while they try to do their best, both parents and children can be horribly damaged by the process. While I think a parental abduction of a kid is a tragedy, I feel it's a far different thing than children who are abducted by strangers. I'm not saying they're not both horrible. But the intensity of a search effort should be higher when there is a legitimate, well-founded fear of the child being hurt. I know, that's what the Amber alerts (and Code Adams) are for.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 02, 2006 at 10:59 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.