AUGUSTA, Maine — The Maine State Police and the Augusta Police Department credited the Amber Alert system in large part for Tuesday’s reunion of a missing 3-year-old Augusta girl with her family, representatives of those two agencies said Wednesday.
Tuesday’s statewide activation of the Amber Alert system was the second time it was used since it was put into place in Maine in 2002, Maine Department of Public Safety spokesman Stephen McCausland said Wednesday.
The only other time that the Amber Alert has been activated for a Maine missing child case was in 2009, McCausland said.
“It was the abduction of a Sanford girl by her father,” McCausland said of the use of the Amber Alert in 2009. “The two were found later safe on a woods road in New Hampshire by a hunter who took the father into custody at gunpoint.”
Tuesday’s Amber Alert was activated after Lenore Wilson’s mother was taken to the hospital for what McCausland described as a drug-related medical emergency.
Deputy Chief Jared Mills of the Augusta Police Department said Wednesday that law enforcement began considering the child endangered after a woman identified as Fatima L. Gissentaner, 26, of Augusta told officials that she had the child and planned to turn her over to Augusta police.
Gissentaner, who is staying in Augusta and had watched the girl before, was believed to be traveling with her boyfriend, identified only by his nickname “Dollar,” McCausland said Tuesday in a news release. Both Gissentaner and “Dollar” are from New York.
When the child was not returned, “obviously there was some cause for concern,” Mills said.
“When you talk to the police and you tell police you’re going to bring a child that doesn’t belong to you to them [and fail to do so], there’s going to be a problem,” he added.
Mills credited the investigators who worked on the case and the Amber Alert system for “bringing this to the resolution it did.”
No one had been charged in connection with the incident as of late Wednesday afternoon.
“The big thing for us is that the child is safe,” Mills said.
Police have turned their attention to “determining if anyone is found to have done something wrong criminally and [if so], we’re going to issue the appropriate charges. … We still want to talk to [Gissentaner] and Dollar,” Mills said.
Mills said police are not identifying the person who brought the child to the Augusta police station.
“He didn’t do anything wrong. He was part of the successful resolution. He knows everybody involved, including the family. As soon as he heard the Amber Alert, he returned the child appropriately,” Mills said. “He was at the right place at the right time.”
Mills did not disclose the child’s whereabouts.
“The only thing I can say is that the child is in a safe location and that [the Maine Department of Health and Human Services] is involved,” he said.
According to McCausland, the Maine State Police is the agency designated to issue Amber Alerts, but only in specific cases.
“It’s an established criteria that police departments in Maine are familiar with but, in essence, the child has to be endangered,” he said.
“I can tell you that we are asked many times by a police department to consider an Amber Alert,” McCausland said.
They are not, however, meant to be activated for runaways or when parental visitations run later than scheduled.
“The system worked like it was supposed to,” he said of Tuesday’s incident, noting that the child was located within four hours.
He said that a critique will take place in the near future to determine if any improvements can be made to the system.
“There are a number of different layers,” McCausland said. “There is an email that goes out to the media and to various state officials. The turnpike and MDOT [roadside] signs are activated. The Maine Lottery Commission machines are activated to display the information as well. The cellphone alerts take place — at least three of them yesterday,” he said.
This time, however, there were some new components that weren’t in place in 2009. One was to broadcast the alerts verbally via radio and the other was the use of cellphone text alerts.
McCausland said cellphone alerts can only be activated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency or the Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s clearinghouse.
“Both have the capability to zero in on a certain area of the nation and send out a cellphone alert,” he said.
Mills and McCausland said that in addition to detectives, personnel from the FBI, county sheriff’s deputies and state police and federal data analysts helped bring the girl back safe.
For more information, view the Maine Amber Alert Plan at mab.org/assets/uploads/2014/03/Maine-AMBER-master-plan-revised-2010.pdf or visit Amberalert.gov.