Technology boosts odds in recovering missing children

Daniela Mohor

Friday, Nov. 23, 2001 | 12:52 p.m.

Brenda Ortiz had been waiting eight years for the news: Last year Redwood City, Calif., detectives told her they had found her nephew, Jonathan.

When he was 2 his mother had fled with him after an attempt had been made to poison her husband, Ortiz's brother.

If it weren't for technology, Ortiz believes she might have had to wait much longer.

"I am very pleased. Usually I would think people would give up, but they didn't," she said. "Technology helped a lot."

Jonathan is one of the thousands of missing children in the United States found as a result of new technology that can show what children might look like years later.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children -- a national resource center for law enforcement agencies working to protect minors -- made an age-progression photo of Jonathan, as it does for all children who have been missing for two years or more.

The technology draws from pictures of the parents and of the child at the age of disappearance to create a computerized image that shows how a child may look years later.

Only a month after the age-progressed picture of Jonathan was posted, someone recognized him.

Jonathan is not the only child who has benefited from the digital age. Today one of every six children whose photos have been age-progressed is found, officials say.

The technology has helped increase the number of missing children recovered from 62 percent to 93 percent in the past 10 years, officials say.

In Nevada only three of the 630 children recovered in the past 10 years had age-progressed photos created. But the technology should soon be applied to more recent cases, such as Karla Rodriguez, a 7-year-old Las Vegas girl who was last seen in October 1999 walking to her elementary school.

"It's important because children don't look the same," said Daniel D. Broughton, founding chairman of the center. "While their face grows, their structure changes ... It's a very successful tool."

Although age progression is pretty sophisticated, investigators attribute their success to other techniques too.

A cyber hotline, a network of websites in 12 countries around the world, as well as software that targets poster distribution are some of the tools that help keep cases alive.

"To million of Americans we are the milk carton people, but we've gone a long way from there," said Ernie Allen, president and chief executive officer of the center for exploited children. "Today, thanks to technology, if a child is reported missing, photos are scanned and sent to us online and we have disseminated it around America and the world in a matter of minutes."

The tipline, which can be accessed at www.missingkids.com, has led to the arrest and prosecution of hundreds of kidnappers, Allen said.

"Here is a real living, breathing example of a way in which you can use technology to save people's lives, to solve one of America's most complex social problems," he said.

But for the center that is not enough. Allen and his colleagues want to take one more step. With the help of a number of high-tech companies, the center plans to expand the use of technology to other situations.

A project to build a worldwide network to reunify families who have been separated is in the making.

"In the aftermath of Sept. 11, we've been approached by a number of groups and individuals who said in this terrible situation, invariably what happens is that parents and children are separated," Allen said. "So we will ... help adapt technology that could be used in partnership with relief organizations and emergency response organizations to help reunify families and children disrupted and separated by this kind of crisis."