Amber Alert takes effect with Guinn’s signature

Tuesday, May 6, 2003 | 11:15 a.m.

CARSON CITY -- Just a week after President Bush held a special ceremony in the Rose Garden to sign an Amber Alert law, Gov. Kenny Guinn this morning approved Nevada's version of the same measure.

With bill sponser Richard Perkins, D-Henderson, joining him for the signing ceremony, Guinn inked Assembly Bill 322, which creates a statewide system for the safe return of missing childen.

The law, most of which took effect with the governor's signature shortly after 10 a.m. today, creates a 12-member statewide committee to establish and oversee the alert system. The committee is a partnership of law enforcement agencies and broadcasters.

The alerts, which will be disseminated over an emergency broadcast system, will notify the public about child abductions and any pertinent information that would help in locating them, such as vehicle descriptions.

During testimony in committee, Perkins, a deputy police chief in Henderson, said roughly 70 percent of children who are taken and murdered are killed within the first three hours of their abduction.

He said Nevada's system will be successful if it saves just one life.

The commission will oversee establishment of Nevada's system, including naming it. The national law Bush signed last week with once-abducted Elizabeth Smart and her parents at his side takes the name many states use in honor of Amber Hagerman, a 9-year-old girl abducted and killed in Arlington, Texas, in 1997.

In Washoe County a similar alert system was named for Krystal Steadman, a 9-year-old kidnapped from a Lake Tahoe apartment complex and murdered in 2000.