The creative techniques that rescuers use to find missing children with autism

By Darran Simon, CNN

(CNN) — The voice of a cartoon character. A favorite song. Messages from their parents.

When children with autism go missing, rescuers get to know their likes and dislikes, and use familiar sounds to draw them out during the search.

This week, authorities pumped pre-recorded messages from Maddox Scott Ritch's parents into the sprawling Rankin Lake Park in Gastonia, North Carolina -- the last place the 6-year-old boy was seen before he disappeared on Saturday.

Maddox has autism, a bio-neurological development disability that usually appears before the age of 3, and is nonverbal. Autism affects 1 in 59 children, according to the National Autism Association, and more than half are classified as having an intellectual disability or a borderline intellectual disability.

Kids with autism are often prone to wandering or bolting away -- Ian Ritch told reporters that he lost sight of his son when he took off running -- and searching for them is complicated by several factors, including their sensory issues and their likes and dislikes.

Experts said it's important to quickly develop a profile of a missing child to determine what techniques should be used to find them, and to be creative.

"Many of these children are more likely to respond to a favorite character, a unique interest or familiar voice," said Lori McIlwain, a co-founder of the National Autism Association. "It's imperative that first responders always talk to the parents to get a sense of what their particular likes and dislikes are. You could have one child that likes fire trucks and one that doesn't."

Seven years ago, searchers blasted one of young Joshua Robb's favorite tunes, Ozzy Osbourne's "No More Tears," in an effort find him after he disappeared into the San Bernardino National Forest in California. A rescue team heard some mumbling in the bushes and found the then-8-year-old 24 hours after he ran from his school.

"He was just standing there in a bush, no shirt, no shoes, just in his shorts and was very happy to be found," Justin Wheaton, one rescuer recalled in an interview with CNN at the time.

Maddox Scott Ritch

McIlwain, an association board member who has a teenage son with autism, said that kind of personalized approach has been successful.

In 2012, she worked with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children to create federal search and rescue guidelines for missing children with special needs that law enforcement use. McIlwain said police officers have even played the voice of cartoon character Elmo in their search.

In some cases, rescuers have been too late.

Related Article: Recording of mother's voice used in search for missing autistic New York teen

In 2013, members of the New York City Police Department and other first responders combed the streets playing a recording of Avonte Oquendo's mother calling out to him. The 14-year-old, who was nonverbal like Maddox, was last seen on surveillance video running out of a school on Long Island City on the afternoon of October 4.

Police also deployed dogs, combed surveillance footage and repeatedly searched each of New York City's 468 subway stations because of Avonte's love of trains.

The teenager's remains were found three months later in the East River.

Related Article: 'It's Avonte': NYC family grieves, seethes after remains of missing autistic boy ID'd

More than a decade ago, Brian Herritt, a California police officer whose son has severe autism, said he realized that other police departments didn't have the skills to deal with people with autism. So he started training them.

Now retired, Herritt said he teaches the first responders and other groups he trains to immediately develop a profile of the missing child, even during the initial call to dispatch. Herritt said time is critical because children with disabilities don't understand the danger they're in and gravitate to dangerous things, such as water or traffic.

The mortality risk for those with autism is twice as high as the general population, largely due to drowning and other accidents, according to the autism association."Six-year old kids don't go missing forever," said Herritt, who is not involved in the search for Maddox. "He's somewhere, they just have to continue to put resources to find him.""I'm sure every officer ... wants nothing more than to find this boy and reunite him with his family," he said. "As a cop, we protect people, and we protect people with special needs more because they need protection."

The creative techniques that rescuers use to find missing children with autism

By Darran Simon, CNN

Updated at 11:38 PM ET, Wed September 26, 2018

Mother pleads for return of missing 6-year-old 01:11

(CNN) — The voice of a cartoon character. A favorite song. Messages from their parents.

When children with autism go missing, rescuers get to know their likes and dislikes, and use familiar sounds to draw them out during the search.

This week, authorities pumped pre-recorded messages from Maddox Scott Ritch's parents into the sprawling Rankin Lake Park in Gastonia, North Carolina -- the last place the 6-year-old boy was seen before he disappeared on Saturday.

Maddox has autism, a bio-neurological development disability that usually appears before the age of 3, and is nonverbal. Autism affects 1 in 59 children, according to the National Autism Association, and more than half are classified as having an intellectual disability or a borderline intellectual disability.

Kids with autism are often prone to wandering or bolting away -- Ian Ritch told reporters that he lost sight of his son when he took off running -- and searching for them is complicated by several factors, including their sensory issues and their likes and dislikes.

Experts said it's important to quickly develop a profile of a missing child to determine what techniques should be used to find them, and to be creative.

"Many of these children are more likely to respond to a favorite character, a unique interest or familiar voice," said Lori McIlwain, a co-founder of the National Autism Association. "It's imperative that first responders always talk to the parents to get a sense of what their particular likes and dislikes are. You could have one child that likes fire trucks and one that doesn't."

Seven years ago, searchers blasted one of young Joshua Robb's favorite tunes, Ozzy Osbourne's "No More Tears," in an effort find him after he disappeared into the San Bernardino National Forest in California. A rescue team heard some mumbling in the bushes and found the then-8-year-old 24 hours after he ran from his school.

"He was just standing there in a bush, no shirt, no shoes, just in his shorts and was very happy to be found," Justin Wheaton, one rescuer recalled in an interview with CNN at the time.

Maddox Scott Ritch

McIlwain, an association board member who has a teenage son with autism, said that kind of personalized approach has been successful.

In 2012, she worked with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children to create federal search and rescue guidelines for missing children with special needs that law enforcement use. McIlwain said police officers have even played the voice of cartoon character Elmo in their search.

In some cases, rescuers have been too late.

Related Article: Recording of mother's voice used in search for missing autistic New York teen

In 2013, members of the New York City Police Department and other first responders combed the streets playing a recording of Avonte Oquendo's mother calling out to him. The 14-year-old, who was nonverbal like Maddox, was last seen on surveillance video running out of a school on Long Island City on the afternoon of October 4.

Police also deployed dogs, combed surveillance footage and repeatedly searched each of New York City's 468 subway stations because of Avonte's love of trains.

The teenager's remains were found three months later in the East River.

Related Article: 'It's Avonte': NYC family grieves, seethes after remains of missing autistic boy ID'd

More than a decade ago, Brian Herritt, a California police officer whose son has severe autism, said he realized that other police departments didn't have the skills to deal with people with autism. So he started training them.

Now retired, Herritt said he teaches the first responders and other groups he trains to immediately develop a profile of the missing child, even during the initial call to dispatch. Herritt said time is critical because children with disabilities don't understand the danger they're in and gravitate to dangerous things, such as water or traffic.

The mortality risk for those with autism is twice as high as the general population, largely due to drowning and other accidents, according to the autism association."Six-year old kids don't go missing forever," said Herritt, who is not involved in the search for Maddox. "He's somewhere, they just have to continue to put resources to find him.""I'm sure every officer ... wants nothing more than to find this boy and reunite him with his family," he said. "As a cop, we protect people, and we protect people with special needs more because they need protection."

NCMEC - Search For Missing Children

Select an image to view the poster for one of these missing children.

If you have any information, please call:

1-800-843-5678 (1-800-THE-LOST)

Reading Aloud to Young Children Has Benefits for Behavior and Attention

By Perri Klass, M.D.

It’s a truism in child development that the very young learn through relationships and back-and-forth interactions, including the interactions that occur when parents read to their children. A new study provides evidence of just how sustained an impact reading and playing with young children can have, shaping their social and emotional development in ways that go far beyond helping them learn language and early literacy skills. The parent-child-book moment even has the potential to help curb problem behaviors like aggression, hyperactivity and difficulty with attention, a new study has found.

“We think of reading in lots of different ways, but I don’t know that we think of reading this way,” said Dr. Alan Mendelsohn, an associate professor of pediatrics at New York University School of Medicine, who is the principal investigator of the study, “Reading Aloud, Play and Social-Emotional Development,” published in the journal Pediatrics.

The researchers, many of whom are my friends and colleagues, showed that an intervention, based in pediatric primary care, to promote parents reading aloud and playing with their young children could have a sustained impact on children’s behavior. (I am among those the authors thanked in the study acknowledgments, and I should acknowledge in return that I am not only a fervent believer in the importance of reading aloud to young children, but also the national medical director of Reach Out and Read, a related intervention, which works through pediatric checkups to promote parents reading with young children.)

This study involved 675 families with children from birth to 5; it was a randomized trial in which 225 families received the intervention, called the Video Interaction Project, and the other families served as controls. The V.I.P. model was originally developed in 1998, and has been studied extensively by this research group.

Participating families received books and toys when they visited the pediatric clinic. They met briefly with a parenting coach working with the program to talk about their child’s development, what the parents had noticed, and what they might expect developmentally, and then they were videotaped playing and reading with their child for about five minutes (or a little longer in the part of the study which continued into the preschool years). Immediately after, they watched the videotape with the study interventionist, who helped point out the child’s responses.

“They get to see themselves on videotape and it can be very eye-opening how their child reacts to them when they do different things,” said Adriana Weisleder, one of the authors of the study, who is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Northwestern University. “We try to highlight the positive things in that interaction — maybe they feel a little silly, and then we show them on the tape how much their kid loves it when they do these things, how fun it is — it can be very motivating.”

“Positive parenting activities make the difference for children,” said Dr. Benard Dreyer, a professor of pediatrics at New York University School of Medicine and past president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, who was the senior author on the study. He noted that the critical period for child development starts at birth, which is also a time when there are many pediatric visits. “This is a great time for us to reach parents and help them improve their parenting skills, which is what they want to do.”

The Video Interaction Project started as an infant-toddler program, working with low-income urban families in New York during clinic visits from birth to 3 years of age. Previously published data from a randomized controlled trial funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development showed that the 3-year-olds who had received the intervention had improved behavior — that is, they were significantly less likely to be aggressive or hyperactive than the 3-year-olds in the control group.

This new study looked at those children a year and a half later — much closer to school entry — and found that the effects on behavior persisted. The children whose families had participated in the intervention when they were younger were still less likely to manifest those behavior problems — aggression, hyperactivity, difficulty with attention — that can so often make it hard for children to do well and learn and prosper when they get to school.

Some children were enrolled in a second stage of the project, and the books and toys and videotaping continued as they visited the clinic from age 3 to 5; they showed additional “dose-response” effects; more exposure to the “positive parenting” promotion meant stronger positive impacts on the children’s behavior.

“The reduction in hyperactivity is a reduction in meeting clinical levels of hyperactivity,” Dr. Mendelsohn said. “We may be helping some children so they don’t need to have certain kinds of evaluations.” Children who grow up in poverty are at much higher risk of behavior problems in school, so reducing the risk of those attention and behavior problems is one important strategy for reducing educational disparities — as is improving children’s language skills, another source of school problems for poor children.

But all parents should appreciate the ways that reading and playing can shape cognitive as well as social and emotional development, and the power of parental attention to help children flourish. Dr. Weisleder said that in reading and playing, children can encounter situations a little more challenging than what they usually come across in everyday life, and adults can help them think about how to manage those situations.

“Maybe engaging in more reading and play both directly reduces kids’ behavior problems because they’re happier and also makes parents enjoy their child more and view that relationship more positively,” she said.

Reading aloud and playing imaginative games may offer special social and emotional opportunities, Dr. Mendelsohn said. “We think when parents read with their children more, when they play with their children more, the children have an opportunity to think about characters, to think about the feelings of those characters,” he said. “They learn to use words to describe feelings that are otherwise difficult and this enables them to better control their behavior when they have challenging feelings like anger or sadness.”

“The key take-home message to me is that when parents read and play with their children when their children are very young — we’re talking about birth to 3 year olds — it has really large impacts on their children’s behavior,” Dr. Mendelsohn said. And this is not just about families at risk. “All families need to know when they read, when they play with their children, they’re helping them learn to control their own behavior,” he said, so that they will come to school able to manage the business of paying attention and learning.

FBI - 2017 Crime Statistics Released

Annual Statistics are Available in Crime Data Explorer  

Both violent crime and property crime declined in 2017 when compared with 2016 data, according to the FBI’s annual crime statistics released today.

Overall violent crime decreased 0.2 percent from 2016 to last year, while property crime decreased 3 percent during that time, according to Crime in the United States, 2017, the FBI’s annual compilation of crime statistics. The information was reported to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program by more than 16,000 law enforcement agencies across the country.

---

There were more than 1.2 million violent crimes reported to UCR nationwide in 2017. There was a 0.7 percent decrease in murders and a 4 percent decrease in robberies from 2016 to 2017. Aggravated assaults increased 1 percent in 2017. The FBI began collecting data solely on an updated rape definition last year, and 135,755 rapes were reported to law enforcement in 2017.

The report also showed there were more than 7.7 million property crimes last year. Burglaries decreased 7.6 percent and larceny-thefts decreased 2.2 percent. Motor vehicle thefts increased 0.8 percent from 2016 to 2017.

As part of a broader effort to modernize crime data reporting, the FBI’s UCR Program publishes this data both in the report and in the Crime Data Explorer (CDE) tool. Released last year, the CDE tool provides a central place to search, sort, and evaluate crime data in a more user-friendly format than individual reports.

Rather than viewing crime data in four separate reports (Crime in the United States, National Incident-Based Reporting System, Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted, and Hate Crime Statistics) each year, this data will be uploaded annually into the CDE tool for a more comprehensive picture of crime statistics. Although each report will be uploaded yearly in the short term, the long-term plan is to release data on a quarterly basis.

“It’s an interactive tool that allows law enforcement and public users to more easily understand UCR crime data on a national level,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a message accompanying the report. “We’re upgrading the database and publishing data sets more routinely, so that we’ll have a better understanding of what’s happening in our communities.”

Transcript | Download

Full Report

• Crime in the United States, 2017

Resources

• FBI Releases 2017 Crime Statistics
• Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program

Videos

• FBI Crime Data Explorer

Sheriff: Child found naked, chained in central Alabama home

'Three adults are facing torture and child abuse charges after a child was found naked and chained up inside a central Alabama home.'

by Emma Simmons

The child's mother, Danielle Nicole Martin, 32 (left), stepfather Joshua Daniel Martin, 26 (center), and grandmother Vickie Seale Higginbotham, 58 (right), were taken into custody and charged with torture and child abuse. (Autauga County Sheriff's Office)

Three adults are facing torture and child abuse charges after a child was found naked and chained up inside a central Alabama home.

On Thursday an anonymous caller tipped off Autauga County Sheriff's Office to a case of child abuse at a Prattville home on the 2500 block of County Road 46. Deputies responding to the home found a naked 13-year-old boy whose ankles were padlocked and chained to a door, restricting his movement. An investigation revealed the child had been chained over a long period of time.

The child's mother, Danielle Nicole Martin, 32, stepfather Joshua Daniel Martin, 26, and grandmother Vickie Seale Higginbotham, 58, were taken into custody and charged with torture and child abuse. Each suspect was booked into the Autauga  Metro Jail on a $15,000 cash bond.

The child, along with two others aged five and 12, was removed from the home and placed in the care of DHR.

Autauga authorities say additional charges could be forthcoming pending the investigation.

tiny.cc/hxh6yy

NCMEC - Search For Missing Children

Select an image to view the poster for one of these missing children.

If you have any information, please call:

1-800-843-5678 (1-800-THE-LOST)