Unidentified Young Girl - ~8 yo - West Valley City (W of Salt Lake City) UT

Police continued
searching Thursday night for a girl who was reported kidnapped from the
West Valley City area that morning, police said.
The girl, who is believed to be about 8 years old, was riding a
skateboard alone about 10 a.m., when a car with two men inside pulled
over near 5600 West and 5000 South, cutting off a car in the next lane,
said Unified Police Lt. Don Hutson.
One of the men grabbed the child under his arm and placed her into
an older-model white sedan, according to the woman whose car was cut off
by the sedan. He or the girl apparently also took the skateboard.
The woman reported the possible kidnapping and told police the car
traveled north on 5600 West. It was not speeding, Hutson said. The woman
drove along side the vehicle at least once and there didn't appear to
be a disturbance between the passengers in the car, Hutson said.
The woman followed the vehicle until losing sight of it near the
intersection with 4100 South, Hutson said.
The girl did not scream or flail when the man grabbed her, Hutson
said, and no one has yet filed a missing-child report matching her
description.
Nonetheless, more than 100 law enforcement officers combed the area
early Thursday afternoon, knocking on doors to try to glean more
information. They issued an Amber Alert about 2:30 p.m.
"We're choosing to err on the side of caution," said Salt Lake
County Sheriff Jim Winder. "If it was my child, I'd want all the
resources out and about."
The girl is described as being white with blond hair, wearing a
light blue sundress and brown sandals.
The white sedan had a license plate that contained 977OJ or 977AJ,
and the model year was between 1989 and 1995. The two men appeared to be
Latino. The man who grabbed the child was about 6 feet tall and 180
pounds, wearing a white T-shirt and light blue jeans. He looked to be in
his 30s and was clean cut with hair cut short on the sides.
The woman was the only witness to the incident. Anyone with
information about the possible kidnapping is asked to call police at
801-743-7000.

Police are searching for an eight-year-old girl. A
witness claims two men drove to her, one man put her in the back of the
car and they drove away. An amber alert has been issued. The
apparent victim is described as having blond hair to the middle of her
back. She was wearing a bright blue sundress and was carrying a
skateboard.The suspect's car is a white older model sedan.
It's possibly a Honda or Nissan. It has Utah license plates with 977OJ
or 977AJ. The possible abduction happened near 5000 South and
5600 West. Police quickly set up a command post behind Hunter
High School in West Valley to lead the search. Three large RV's house
West Valley, United Police and Salt Lake County Sheriff's Department
operations. They are coordinating a helicopter search overhead
and up to 100 police on the ground. The officers are scouring
neighborhoods and fields looking for any signs of the apparent victim
and her abductors. Unified Police Department Sheriff Jim
Winder is helping to guide the search. He is not only looking for the
girl. He is also looking for her parents. "What we're presently doing
is going door to door in the neighborhood literally asking do you have
an eight-year-old daughter? Does she match this description?" he said. Police
say a woman witnessed the abduction. She was in her car also traveling
north on 5600 West when the abduction allegedly took place.Winder
interviewed the woman. "She followed for a few minutes, how close she
got I'm not sure, but I think she lost the vehicle in other traffic.
She was just simply unable to keep up or able to follow it...we're in
contact with the witness and I want to commend her very much. This was
clearly a suspicious looking circumstance and we appreciate her very
much taking the time to call police," said Winder.The apparent
abduction took place a little before 10:00 a.m. June 17. An Amber Alert
was issued at 2:32 p.m. more than four hours later. "One of the
criteria for an Amber Alert is a confirmed abduction. Now at present we
do not have a confirmed abduction, enough circumstances have occurred
in this case that I certainly feel comfortable in releasing that Amber
Alert," said Winder. Police officers and citizens like Martie
Ramirez will continue to search until solid answers emerge. "I want to
get in my car. I want to drive all over. I want to look around. I
want to see if I see any little girl," said Ramirez. Police say
they do not need volunteers to come to their command post. They thanked
Ramirez and asked her to return home. Police are asking for people in
Utah to search the area around their home. The witness says the
victim is an eight-years-old girl with long blond hair to her waist.
She was wearing a bright blue sundress and carrying a skateboard.The
suspect's car is an older model white sedan, a Honda or Nissan, with
Utah license plate that includes the numbers 9770J or 977AJ.The
suspects are two hispanic men. The passenger was in his 30's and was
wearing a white T-shirt and blue jean's.

Police have called off an Amber Alert for a missing girl after
receiving no reports from anyone claiming to be missing their child.Officers
will continue follow up on leads, but don't believe they have enough
information to issue another Amber Alert. The alert was issued on
Thursday after a woman claimed she saw two men pull a young girl into a
car but provided little information about the vehicle. Police
officers were called to the scene just after 2 p.m. and remained there
until the alert was called off.

There's still a mystery surrounding yesterday's amber alert for an 8
year old girl. Who is she? And who took her?

Unified Police
Lieutenant Don Hutson tells us they do believe the driver who saw the
little girl taken off the street near 5000 South and 5600 West.

He
says several other witnesses saw the girl in that area at that time.
But they don't know who took her. They are assuming it was a family
member or friend who had come to pick up the girl.

The amber
alert was cancelled last night after no one reported a missing child.

It looked like a horrible crime happening in broad
daylight. A car cut across busy 5600 West on June 17, two Hispanic men
jumped out and grabbed a white, blonde-haired 8-year-old girl off the
street and threw her in the car. A woman watched them do it, calling 911
and reporting a kidnapping. Police believed it was real, too, and
issued an AMBER Alert.

"It is still an unknown circumstance, and we hope and pray and believe
strongly that there was not an abduction," Sheriff Jim Winder of the
Unified Police Department said on Wednesday.

A panel of police, broadcasters and the Utah Attorney General's Office
reviewed the case to decide if an AMBER Alert was justified. The Salt
Lake County Sheriff defended their decision.


"A child is alleged to have been snatched off the street and placed in a
car," Winder said. "We're going to take the actions that we took."

The committee reviewed the circumstances and decided that Unified Police
did the right thing in issuing the alert, which utilizes TV, radio,
highway signs, websites and text messages to notify the public of an
abducted child.

"In this case, it was successful in that we eliminated the possibility
that a child had been kidnapped," Paul Murphy, the Utah Attorney
General's AMBER Alert coordinator said Wednesday.

The girl has never been found. No one ever called to report a child
missing, and no one ever called police to say they took a child off of
the street. One of the concerns is overusing the AMBER Alert and "crying
wolf." Of the 31 alerts issued in the past eight years that Utah has
had an AMBER Alert system, only one other child has never been found.

"We don't want this to be the car alarm syndrome with the AMBER Alert,"
said Dale Zabriskie of the Utah Broadcaster's Association. "We've been
very careful with that."

Zabriskie said the circumstances of the abduction, including the racial
disparity between suspect and victim, the facts of the case and that the
witness believed that she had witnessed an actual abduction led
authorities to issue the AMBER Alert. They kept it active until the
evening, when they finally called it off. Winder said that led people to
call TV stations and even Unified Police to complain that the alert was
interrupting an NBA Finals game.

"My concern is that, the media, and I know they're more thick-skinned
than this, would not participate in an AMBER Alert because of what I
think are ill-placed concerns," Winder said.

The sheriff said that if he had to do it all over again, he wouldn't
hesitate.

"We're talking about the lives of children here," Winder said. "If we
had 50 false alerts and we found one child, the 49 were worth it."