A late-night party turned into a nightmare for parents living in the small Northern California town of Yreka. On March 2, 2009, a stranger stopped by the party at the parent's home and later fled with their 3-year-old girl.
The victim's father heard his daughter's screams at 4:30 a.m. and saw the man leave in a 1992 Pontiac Grand Am.
Yreka Police Department's Lieutanant Dave Gamache was contacted, and an AMBER Alert was issued at 6:53 a.m. for 22-year-old Kody Lee Kaplon and a small brown-haired girl wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt.
“It was unbelievable” said Gamache. “I had no idea the AMBER Alert was so simple to use and would be so widespread in such a short period of time. Within 30 minutes after issuing the alert, I was up to my eyeballs with phone calls ringing off the hook. It worked seamlessly.”
Since Yreka is close to the Oregon and Nevada borders, the California Highway Patrol asked both states to also issue alerts. The Yreka Police Department had never handled a stranger abduction case, and this was the agency’s first AMBER Alert.
“The thing that sticks out in my mind is that we deal with bigger agencies with a lot of resources and this was a small agency and they did an amazing job handling everything that was going on,” said Captain LD Maples, California AMBER Alert Coordinator.
Ironically, Gamache said his agency had just signed up to take AMBER Alert training the following month. “We have everything but not very much of it,” he said. “I was not going to let pride get in the way of asking for help to find this girl.”
The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children also called to offer help and immediately sent two agents from Team Adam.
“The AMBER Alert went very smoothly. Everything happened by the book,” said Adrienne Abbott, Nevada Chair for the Emergency Alert System. “The California Highway Patrol, Nevada Highway Patrol, and the Yreka Police department were constantly in communication.”
The AMBER Alert was working as planned but a 3-year-old girl was still missing. Temperatures were dropping, snow was falling and authorities knew they were running out of time to save the girl.
At 2 p.m., the suspect called a designated AMBER Alert phone line to ask police why they were looking for him. Yreka had recently set up a phone bank for natural disasters and officers asked an animal control officer, a secretary, and others to handle all the calls for the alert.
At about the same time, a Yreka officer ran into people panning for gold in the search area and they offered to drop their pans and start looking for the girl. The volunteer searchers took a 4-wheel-drive vehicle and followed car tracks on a remote dirt road. They found the suspect's abandoned vehicle and discovered the girl hiding in some bushes at 3:21 p.m.
The alert was cancelled three minutes later and Kaplon surrendered to police. The girl told police that the suspect had buried her in the mud and left her, but she was able to dig herself out.
“The recovery was the direct result of the AMBER Alert,” said Abbott, and then he asked, “Isn't that the point of the AMBER Alert? You're always thankful when the child is recovered alive. As a parent what else can I say?”
Kaplon is now charged with kidnapping, sexual abuse and cruelty to a child, burglary, and attempted murder.
An AMBER Alert, the response of ordinary citizens and a small police department that was not afraid to ask for help, changed what could have been a tragedy into a miracle.
“There were so many pieces of the puzzle I hate to think what would have happened if one of the pieces would have been missing,” concluded Gamache. “I probably will never have another case that makes me feel so good that everything worked.”