FLORIDA News

Tallahassee will host Florida's twelfth annual Missing Children's Day on Monday.The event is led by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s Missing Endangered Persons Information Clearinghouse Advisory Board.The formal ceremony will take place on the courtyard between the Old Capitol and new Capitol at 10 a.m. A child safety fair will begin at 9 a.m. in the plaza area of the Capitol. Children will have the opportunity to be fingerprinted, photographed, and receive child safety literature. The public is invited to attend.

During the weekend leading up to the event, advertisers with the Florida Outdoor Advertising Association (FOAA) will be donating digital billboard space throughout the state to feature children and adults from Florida that are still missing. Lamar, Clear Channel Outdoor and CBS outdoor are participating. The artwork will feature 25 missing children and adults. The billboards will run beginning today through Monday.There are seven billboards in Lee County that will feature four of the missing.

“The Florida Department of Law Enforcement appreciates our outdoor advertisers for partnering with us once again to broadcast the photos of missing children and adults,” said Commissioner Gerald Bailey. “It is our hope that someone, somewhere in our state will recognize one of these faces and provide us with information that will reunite them with their families.”

The following children and adults will be featured on billboards: • Danielle Bell, missing from Pensacola since Sept. 28, 2001
• Tavia Bailey, missing from Pensacola since Jan. 24, 1986
• Preston Mills, missing from Pensacola since June 25, 2010
• Ali Gilmore, missing from Tallahassee since Feb. 2, 2006
• David Jackson, missing from Tallahassee since Oct. 28, 2008
• Portesha Morris, missing from Monticello since April 16, 2001
• Tiffany Sessions, missing from Gainesville since Feb. 9, 1989
• Shirlene Roberts, missing from Jacksonville since Sept. 9, 2009
• Mark Gibson, missing from Jacksonville since March 12, 2008
• Mark Degner, missing from Jacksonville since Feb. 10, 2005
• Bryan Hayes, missing from Jacksonville since Feb. 10, 2005
• Zachary Bernhardt, missing from Clearwater since Sept. 11, 2000
• Ronkeya Holes and Masaraha Ross, missing from Haines City since Oct. 18, 2009
• Jennifer Kesse, missing from Orlando since Jan. 24, 2006
• Phillip Desir, missing from Palm Bay since Feb. 7, 2009
• Desiree Wilson, missing from Orlando since Jan. 16, 2010
• Navisha Maddox, missing from Orlando since April 15, 2008
• Jacqueline Hernandez, missing from Clermont since Dec. 22, 2007
• Teresa Alfonso, missing from Marathon since Sept. 3, 1974
• Lucely Aramburo, missing from Kendall since June 1, 2007
• Deelee Bohler, missing from Miami since Nov. 2, 2005
• Gayle Moran, missing from Lake Placid since July 30, 2009
• Danny Mordenti, missing from Punta Gorda since May 22, 2008
• Alexander Erb-Sanchez, missing from Ellenton since Nov. 4, 2008

Florida Missing Children’s Day is held each year to recognize past and present missing children and their families, to educate citizens on safety awareness, and to honor individuals in our state who have made a difference in the life of a child. Families of missing persons will travel to Tallahassee to attend the ceremony and honor the memory of their loved one.

During the formal ceremony, awards will be given to individuals in the following categories: Law Enforcement Task Force/Team of the Year, Local Law Enforcement Officer of the Year, Federal Law Enforcement Officer of the Year, Jimmy Ryce Trailing Team of the Year, School Bus Operator of the Year, Citizen of the Year, Commissioner's Award, John and Reve Walsh Award, Evelyn Williams Memorial Award, Statewide Fifth Grade Essay Contest Winner; and DOJ Poster Contest Recognition.

Group trains to help with searches involving missing kids

Posted: Oct 11, 2010 6:01PM EDT
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Group trains to help with searches involving missing kids 1:4

Group trains to help with searches involving missing kids

LEE COUNTY: More than 41,000 incidents of missing children were reported to law enforcement in Florida in 2009. Those on the front lines working to find an abducted child train year round and we followed as the Fort Myers Child Abduction Response Team held a mock search.

CART is a multi-agency team comprised of local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies designed to immediately mobilize and provide investigative resources to the lead investigative agency when a child is abducted.

The Fort Myers team is comprised of 43 highly trained local, state and federal agencies from Collier, Charlotte, Lee, Glades, Hendry, Highlands, Okeechobee, Desoto, Manatee, and Sarasota counties.

CART has assisted in high-profile cases in Southwest Florida - including the disappearance of Baby Bryan and Adji Desir. Both children vanished and right now they, along with 300 other children from Florida, are considered missing.For law enforcement, searching for an abducted child is a race against the clock. Statistics show that 44 percent of abducted children are killed within the first hour.

"Time is really of the essence. We need to mobilize as quickly as possible," said Captain Lisa Barnes with the Cape Coral Police Department. CART detectives, dive team, search dogs and volunteers spent Monday training, interviewing and searching for clues."By doing this today, it reinforces our skills. We're making sure we're at the top of our game," said Barnes.Barnes says it's not only law enforcement that has to be aware when someone goes missing, but the public as well. All too often, someone sees something but says nothing.

"That one tip might be what we need to successfully bring that child home," said Barnes.For parents, it's impossible to have a 24-hour watch on your kids but you can do things now in case the worst happens later.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children recommends parents do three things:

1. Get an ID card made with your child's name and information. Keep that with you at all times.
   
2. Try to get DNA, a few strands of hair and put it in a Ziploc bag you can keep somewhere at home.
   
3. Get your child fingerprinted. If a child is abducted and has a set of prints on record, the information can be sent to law enforcement across the country in a matter of minutes.
   

Training session held for local Child Abduction Response Team
Article Photos


MICHAEL PISTELLA
John Snow, left, a Florida Wildlife Commission officer, and Brad Rouskey, a probation officer with the Florida Department of Corrections, question Athena Gonzalez of Rasmussen College during the neighborhood canvas section of Child Abduction Response Team training Monday.


An Amber Alert goes out: A young girl has gone missing from Hammond Stadium in Fort Myers where she was attending a ballgame with her father.

The local Child Abduction Response Team, or CART, responds to the scene.

CART is a multi-agency team comprised of local, state and federal law enforcement agencies that is designed to mobilize immediately and provide investigative resources to a lead agency when a child is abducted, according to officials. CART serves as a force multiplier with a preplanned response.

The Fort Myers team consists of 43 agencies from 10 counties, including Lee, Charlotte, Collier, Glades and Hendry. On Monday, representatives from nearly all of the agencies met at the stadium for the mock abduction to hone their skills. In total, 117 officers and more than 50 volunteers participated.

"Training is the best way to make sure we're ready," said Capt. Lisa Barnes of the Cape Coral Police Department.

According to Barnes, the exercise gives the agencies an opportunity to go through the process, work out any problems and review the paperwork that goes along with a child abduction investigation and how to properly fill it out.

"It's to make sure that everybody's on the same page," Barnes said.At the stadium, the officers were divided up into 57 groups and each was assigned a task. Some conducted search and rescue using K-9s and the grid, and others canvassed the girl's "neighborhood" and nearby "businesses" - vehicles parked outside the stadium with mock addresses posted on paper.

Some of the groups met with the girl's family and gathered information about the child, and some followed up on "leads" that were called in by the public through a special program.There were even teams that checked on real, registered sexual offenders in the region and conducted interviews.

"We will perform as we are trained," said Special Agent Supervisor Tammy Roane of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. "If we train for real life, we will perform that way.

"Cape Det. John Howes spent the day canvassing homes and businesses. He said 40 "calls" generated from the Amber Alert produced 32 "leads," and out of those leads only about 10 provided enough information for a capture.

"We found the girl alive and captured the suspect," he said.

Through questioning and "tips," the officers learned from "witnesses" - local college students serving as volunteers - that a man was seen holding a girl's hand and dragging her through the ballpark's parking lot. They traced the vehicle and tag to a home and found the missing girl yelling in a shed.

Howes said the "mock" abductor turned out to be a ballpark employee.

"I thought it was very realistic," he said. "It's something that could happen at any time.

"According to Roane, statistics show that the longer a child is missing, the less likely it is that the child will be found safely. She said Monday's exercise did two things: allowed the agencies to work on their mobilization time and enabled them to work together, improving communication and cutting time.

"It's important that we all learned to work with one another smoothly," she said. "In a child abduction investigation, time is a critical factor."

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, there were 797,500 children younger than 18 reported missing in a one-year period of time - an average of 2,185 children each day. Of those, 203,900 were the victims of family abductions and 58,200 were the victims of non-family abductions.

One hundred and fifteen were the victims of "stereotypical" kidnapping. These crimes involve someone the child does not know or someone of slight acquaintance, who holds the child overnight, transports the child at least 50 miles, kills the child, demands ransom or plans to keep the child permanently.

Volunteer to help Bay area abused and neglected kids
4 hrs ago

Tampa, Florida -

There's a massive call for volunteers in the Tampa Bay area. Saturday morning, a march was held in Downtown Tampa at the Curtix Hixon Park to draw attention to the need.
Organizers dedicated the march to who they're calling "The Forgotten Children" of Hillsborough County. People carried cardboard cut out images of children to represent the 800 kids who've been removed from their homes due to abuse and neglect.

The children need a guardian ad litem who's a friend and someone who will be their voice and stand up for them in court.Charlie Nelson is the Interim Executive Director for Florida Statewide Guardian ad Litem program and says, "We can teach anyone how to work with an abused and neglected child. The important point is to have the passion that says I'm going to be the person that steps up for that child to make sure they get what they need in the system."

Organizers say there are more than 2,500 children in foster care right now and only 1,700 of them have a guardian ad litem.

Click here for more information on how to become a volunteer.

On Thursday, Florida lawmakers rejected federal child-abuse
prevention funds that were tied to the health care law. The funding
totaled more than $50 million.
Many lawmakers oppose the health care reform package on philosophical grounds.The funding offered under the Affordable Health Care Act would paid
for a visiting nurse program run by Healthy Families Florida, which is
one of the most successful child-abuse prevention efforts in the nation.
Unfortunately, Healthy Families’s budget has been reduced by $10
million last year.
Additionally, since federal Race to the Top educational-reform
efforts are tied to the child-abuse prevention program, then Healthy
Families may face losing a four-year block grant worth an additional
$100 million in federal funds.
Healthy Families started in 1998 with a budget of $10 million. This
program would provide trained home visitors to work with young parents,
who based off their responses to a questionnaire, were at risk for
abusing or neglecting their children. These trained visitors would
offer guidance from healthy eating habits to early childhood development
to recognizing safety hazards. Many of the trained visitors were
nurses and served as resources for these parents.

Healthy Families is a particularly effective program with its
hands-on visitations and concrete parent advice on how to care for their
children. As a result, the program is saving states million of dollars
in the future from costs associated with foster care, delinquency, and
health care.
Read more: http://www.thestatecolumn.com/health/no-child-abuse-prevention-funds-for-florida/#ixzz1T2JiInaI

The
Florida legislature on Thursday passed and sent to the governor a law
intended to protect missing children that was prompted by the death of
two-year-old Caylee Anthony and the acquittal of her mother, Casey, of
murder charges.

The Florida state Senate on Thursday unanimously passed the measure that
would make it a third degree felony to give false information to a law
enforcement officer about a missing child.

The bill, dubbed "Caylee's law," already had passed the state House of
Representatives and now will go to Governor Rick Scott for his
signature.

The proposal responded to public outrage after Casey Anthony was found
not guilty of murder last year in a trial that received saturation media
coverage and was followed by millions of Americans.

Anthony was charged with four counts of lying to police about Caylee and
was sentenced to four years in prison, the maximum sentence for lying
to police, which was a first degree misdemeanor. She was released last
summer after time served.

Caylee went missing in 2008 and prosecutors said she was dead for a
month before Casey Anthony told anyone. Prosecutors said Casey Anthony
repeatedly lied to authorities about her daughter.

Had the bill been in effect, she could have faced up to 20 years in prison and a $20,000 fine for lying to police.





http://www.myvictoriaonline.com/pages/12501128.php?contentType=4&contentId=10155540

Today, the Florida Legislature
passed the nation’s most expansive and hard-hitting mandatory abuse
reporting bill to prevent the kind of cover-ups that produced national
scandals at Penn State and Syracuse.

The bill, Florida HB 1355,
“Protection of Vulnerable Persons,” imposes a fine of up to $1 million
each time any public or private Florida college or university whose
administration or law enforcement agency willfully and knowingly fails
to report child abuse that occurs on its campus, in any of its
facilities, or at/during college or university-sponsored events and
functions. This makes Florida the first state in the nation to better
protect children from institutional cover-ups of child sexual abuse,
brought to light by the Penn State scandal.

“The bill ensures that the
protection of a child is treated as a greater priority than the
reputation of an institution,” said Lauren Book, CEO of the Lauren’s
Kids foundation, survivor of child sexual abuse and architect of the
bill. “It sets a national standard in affirming that child abuse
reporting is everyone’s responsibility.”

The bill also:
· Closes a loophole in the law to require that
the Florida Child Abuse Hotline accepts reports regardless of who
commits the abuse, even if the alleged abuser is not a direct caregiver.
This provision makes Florida one of the only true, fully mandatory
reporting states. No other state will have a stronger reporting law than
Florida.
· Provides $1.5 million in relocation assistance for victims of sexual abuse.

“For 11 straight years the Florida Legislature has
taken up legislation including things like mandatory HIV testing and
full elimination of the statute of limitations for child sexual abuse
victims in an effort to make certain that the children of Florida are
well-protected,” said Ron Book, Florida lobbyist and father of Lauren
Book. “President Haridopolos, Speaker Cannon and bill sponsors,
Representative Dorworth and Senator Benacquisto continue to make certain
through their leadership that we say what we mean and mean what we say.
In this bill there is $4.1 million in funds to make sure that there are
adequate personnel as a result of closing the loophole.”

Lauren Book also applauded the passage of HB 7049,
which increases criminal penalties on sex traffickers.
“There is a large, sick sub-culture that exploits
children for sex, and, as a society, we are not outraged enough to stop
it,” said Lauren Book. “This bill is the beginning of a radical change
in law to impose extreme penalties on people who buy sexual services
from children.”

http://www.wctv.tv/news/headlines/Florida_Passes_Expansive_Mandatory_Abuse_Reporting_Bill_141974973.html?ref=973


The bills will now go through the process on their way to Florida Governor Rick Scott for signature.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Florida Gov. Rick Scott has signed a bill inspired by 2-year-old Caylee Anthony’s death.

The law increases the maximum penalty from a year in jail to five
years in prison for knowingly making a false statement to police about a
missing child.
Caylee’s mother, Casey Anthony, was acquitted last
year of murdering her daughter but convicted on four counts of lying to
investigators.
Caylee wasn’t reported missing until 31 days after she vanished in 2008 in Orlando.
Casey Anthony completed her four-year maximum sentence while awaiting trial on the murder charge.
She could have gotten up to 20 years in prison if the bill had been in effect at that time.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/gov-rick-scott-signs-florida-missing-children-legislation-inspired-by-caylee-anthonys-death/2012/04/06/gIQA2phY0S_print.html