SLED chief: Case of five missing Lexington County children did not meet AMBER Alert criteria

Lexington County Sheriff Lewis McCarty and SLED Chief Mark Keel defended the decision not to issue an AMBER Alert in the case of five missing children, saying it did not meet the criteria used to determine the appropriateness of such an alert.

The primary reason an AMBER Alert was not appropriate in this case, Keel said, is because it was not an abduction by someone who did not have legal custody or control of the children. The children were taken by their father Timothy Ray Jones Jr., 32, who had been granted legal primary custody of the children in divorce documents filed in Lexington County Family Court.

“There was no reason to believe that the children had been abducted by someone who did not have custody care of those children,” Keel said. “We also have to know at that time that there is an immediate fear of harm for those children.”

Amber Jones, the mother of the five children, reported the father and children missing Sept. 3. At the time, she told the Lexington County Sheriff’s Department that there had been other occasions when she had been unable to contact her ex-husband, a news release said. Neighbors told deputies that the children’s father said he was moving with his children from his home in the Red Bank area to another state.

The children’s bodies were found Tuesday in a rural area of Wilcox County, Alabama. Their father will be charged in their deaths, McCarty said.

Information on Timothy Ray Jones and the five children was entered Sept. 3 into the FBI’s National Crime Information Center database, a computerized index available to federal, state and local law enforcements nationwide.

Still, no public notice was issued about the missing children until Tuesday – the same day their bodies were found.

“We were trying to balance the children and the investigation against the releasing of information,” McCarty said in defending the decision. “I made a promise to these children’s mother that I would bring these children home, and I was not going to go back on that promise.”

Bob Hoever, of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, said in this case, an AMBER Alert probably would not have made a difference.

“Law enforcement is under a very delicate balancing act – they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t,” Hoever said. “I don’t think the AMBER Alert would have been effective.”

But Hoever said law enforcement doesn’t need the AMBER Alert system to report to media that the children were missing.

“Just because something isn’t an AMBER Alert, it doesn’t mean we can’t alert the media and get the public’s help,” Hoever said.

This story was originally published September 10, 2014 at 8:07 PM with the headline "SLED chief: Case of five missing Lexington County children did not meet AMBER Alert criteria."