An AMBER alert was issued Tuesday as police in North Carolina search for a 3-year-old missing child.
Local police in Boiling Spring Lakes are looking for Khloe Marlow, who went missing on September 8, and is thought to be with a family member.
According to the alert, Khloe is approximately 3 feet tall and weighs 37 pounds, with brown hair and brown eyes and is believed to be with Jamie Lee Marlow, a 49-year-old woman who local media reports said was Khloe’s grandmother.
Marlow was last seen around 4:30 p.m. on Sunday, in a 2018 red Kia Sportage with the registration PMN9366.
NC Center for Missing Persons / NCDPS
The Boiling Spring Lakes Police Department has advised anyone with information to contact them or the North Carolina Highway Patrol.
Newsweek contacted the Boiling Spring Lakes Police Department for further comment outside standing working hours.
What Is an AMBER Alert?
An AMBER alert is an emergency message broadcast when a law enforcement agency determines that a child has been abducted and is in “imminent danger”. It stands for “America’s Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response.”
The alerts, often prompted by investigations from local police, are broadcast via radio and television as well as through road signs, cell phones and other data-enabled devices.
Between 1996, when the system was first introduced, and 2021, a total of 1,085 children were recovered through the AMBER Alert system, while 97 children have been rescued through the Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA), according to data from the Department of Justice.
The AMBER alert system started in 1996 when broadcasters in the Dallas-Fort Worth area joined forces with local police to develop “an early warning system” to help find children who had been abducted.
The system was created as a legacy to 9-year-old Amber Hagerman, who was kidnapped while riding her bicycle in Arlington, Texas, and then “brutally murdered,” according to the police department.
Soon after, other states and communities established their own “AMBER plans,” as the idea was adopted across the country. There are currently 86 such plans throughout the U.S., as of November 24, 2021.
The most recent report on the success of AMBER alerts, published at the end of 2023, said that there were 67 children recovered who were reported through the program. Of the success stories in 2023, 72 percent of the children were successfully recovered within three hours of those AMBER alerts being issued.
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