An 8 year boy old wandered off from his home on Friday morning prompting a search by Lafayette and Macon County Law Enforcement. The child went missing around 11AM on Friday, June 4. Officers of the Lafayette Police Department, Macon County Sheriffs Office and Macon County Constables Office responded quickly and organized a search for the missing child.

Constable Tom Dallas activated the A Child IS Missing (ACIM) ALERT system immediately upon hearing of the missing child and as a result the Lafayette Police Department received several calls, two of which provided information which indicated a general direction of travel toward and near Coolidge Road allowing officers to focus their search efforts most effectively in the zone of highest probability based on the established direction of travel.

Constable Tom Dallas located the young boy walking on Chaffin Road at approximately 12:00.

The A Child Is Missing Alert system is a service provided by the A Child Is Missing Organization FREE of charge to law enforcement in all 50 states.

Dallas along with representatives of the Lafayette Police Dept. and Macon County Sheriffs Office all attended training on the A Child Is Missing Alert system when it was launched in Tennessee several years ago. Constable Dallas registered the Macon County Constables as users of that system immediately after that training making it available for use by any and all Macon County Law Enforcement.

The system takes only minutes to activate and uses high technology telephone service and GPS mapping to allow the system to send out pre-recorded messages asking residents in areas surrounding the point last seen, to look around their own homes, neighborhoods and other areas for the reported missing persons. The system is capable of placing several thousand phone calls within minutes to all residences within a specified radius of the last known location of a reported missing person.

The total number of calls made for the missing boy was 3,164….all within minutes of him being reported missing.

Unlike AMBER which takes time to activate and only is used for missing children, ACIM can be activated for a wide range of person categories.

A Child goes missing every 40 seconds in the United States.

Your child has a 1 in 42 chance of going missing…

A Child Is Missing (ACIM) is devoted to assisting law enforcement in the search and early safe recovery efforts of children / the elderly (often with Alzheimer’s) / disabled persons, college students and pregnant women via a rapid-response neighborhood alert program utilizing high-tech telephone systems.

The Elderly, (Often with Alzheimer’s and Dementia. two dreaded diseases of the elderly). tend to wander off and often think they are going to go ‘home’. That ‘home’ may be states away. They (The Elderly) tend to walk off and in some cases they will find a body of water, this is not good.

ACIM will make alert calls (when requested by law enforcement) to the last seen areas, to help find these individuals who can’t make rational decisions for themselves.

Disabled People who have been beaten, unconscious, or are suffering from memory loss. ACIM will send out alert calls to find the guardian, parents, and friends. There may be other circumstances but a phone call will inform you if ACIM will run the case. Again, these alert calls are requested by law enforcement only.

For more information visit the ACIM website at http://www.achildismissing.org/about.asp