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Show . Axb9 il0BOrt by Senator Orrin Hal toilf if is i " $ Coordinating the search for America's missing children On Nov. 9, 1980, 11-year-old Kim Peterson of South Salt Lake left his parents' home to see a man who wanted to buy his roller skates. He hasn't been seen since. Almost a year later, last Oct. 20, 4-year-old Danny Davis disappeared from a State Street supermarket, where he was shopping with his grandfather. Police are still looking for Danny and two abductors. Elements of these two tragic crimes, where children virtually vanish, are repeated time and again in Utah and across the nation. Two alleged kidnapping kid-napping attempts were reported, for example, on the same day three weeks ago in Price. Estimates put the national number of such cases at 1.8 million annually. The children face unknown fates ranging from forced separation from their loved ones to violence. Their parents face heartbreak and uncertainty, un-certainty, and the police, all too often, face cases without clues. Records show that only 10 percent of children who are missing for an appreciable ap-preciable length of time are entered into the national missing persons file. The FBI collects information for that file on a voluntary, not an obligatory, basis from state law agencies. And most tragically, each year almost 1,000 cases involving the unidentified dead are closed, leaving 2,000 families a lifetime of uncertainty. These bleak prospects for the resolution of cases involving missing children, and the terrible grief of the cases themselves, have resulted in strong, bi-partisan support for a bill introduced by Sen. Paula Hawkins of Florida. Sen. Hawkins' bill, the Missing Children Act, establishes a national computerized information network to assist police agencies in locating and identifying missing children and to aid in the identification of the dead who are found without evidence to determine their next of kin. It also permits parents to enter data about their missing children directly into the system if local or state police departments fail to do so. Costs of such a system, according to FBI officials who testified at a recent Senate hearing, are relatively negible. The system can be started for $40,000, they said, and maintained for $285,000 a year. Yet the results of such an information network could be priceless. It would give police a chance to share the circumstances cir-cumstances of a local disappearance or the identity and appearance of a victim with the entire nation. It would alleviate the frustrations experienced hy parents like Mr. and Mrs. John Welch of Florida, who naa to cooruina le the search for their missing son among many different agencies. The Welches told a Senate panel that a country that can launch a space shuttle or allocate millions of dollars to save the snail darter should certainly establish a nationwide reporting or search system for its missing children. Numerous law enforcement and civic organizations and 63 Senate co-sponsors, co-sponsors, including myself and Sen. Jake Gam, agree. The outlook for Sen. Hawkins' bill is bright in the Senate and optimistic in the House, where hearings are planned on the measure early in 1982. When Kim Peterson and Danny Davis and numerous other children have been missing so long, the Missing Children Act cannot be implemented soon' enough. |