Maleah Davis: Family abductions have to be handled with a 'high level of care', says former detective
Every year in the US, there are hundreds of missing person cases. Most of them are solved quickly and have no negative impact on the investigators handling them. There are those cases, however, where investigators working tirelessly to find the missing people, especially children, have to go through copious amounts of pressure from the family of the missing child.
This is understandable because children are especially vulnerable to dying within the first 48 hours of them being abducted. Although investigators on each case try their best to make sure that they find missing people as fast as possible, there is always the pressure being felt from families.
The officers involved in the case of missing toddler Maleah Davis suspended the search for her yesterday, two weeks after she went missing. We had previously reported that police spokesperson Jodi Silva said that the Houston Police were working with Texas EquuSearch, a search and rescue organization, to find Maleah.
EquuSearch Founder and Director Tim Miller said on Wednesday, May 15, that searchers were made to focus on the rural area of Rosharon where Derion Vence, who is the suspect in the child's disappearance, had a mail route at one point.
The police have also said that when it comes to deciding how to go forward in missing-persons cases where there isn't a body or any tangible evidence where they can say it was foul play, authorities have to balance their resources against their experience carefully. Founder of the Center for Missing Adults, Kym Pasqualini, said that the media coverage in these situations make a big difference on how big of an investigation the police mount.
The police have to constantly be aware of media appearances where they give away only the information that is required. Former NYPD detective, actor, and chairman and CEO at Beau Dietl & Associates (BDA), Richard A "Bo" Dietl, spoke to MEA WorldWide (MEAWW) about a couple of cases he was personally involved with when it comes to missing children.
Dietl had told us earlier that the statistics of missing children are broken down into runaways, lost, family abductions and non-family abductions. He said: "At BDA we have handled many cases of missing children. One that comes to mind is a young boy who was taken to Denmark by his non-custodial parent. We successfully flew overseas with the child's father and reunited them and brought the child and father back to the United States."
He continued: "Another case is when a non-custodial father abducted his son and took him to a rural area outside of Istanbul, Turkey. BDA investigators with the help of locals, located the child on a farm and reunited him with his mother and escorted them both back to the United States."
We asked Dietl what police officers have to deal with when it comes to providing information to families of the victims while not hampering an on-going investigation at the same time. He said: "The police are professionals, they must be diligent in their work and also demonstrate a high level of care to the family. It is a hard task but in my experience, law enforcement agents that specialize in these cases do their job with the utmost respect, care, and diligence."
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