It was a foggy afternoon in San Francisco, and Theresa Shanley was walking with her 7-year-old daughter Mary through a grocery store parking lot when she saw a panhandler with a young girl shivering in the cold. She thought to herself that something just was not right.
She said her “mother's sense” and the hair on her arms supported her suspicions that the girl was someone she had seen in an AMBER Alert. Shanley tried to find her cell phone but couldn't; she ran into the store to ask a clerk if she could call 911. She thought the worst that could happen is the police would arrive and tell the pair to move on.
“She has the same brown eyes as the girl missing from Virginia,” Shanley told the dispatcher. “Her mother was murdered. I am not a nut, and I do not call you guys all the time. Can you come ID her and see if she should be with that man?”
Shanley was working as a nurse at the San Francisco jail when she saw Nancy Grace on CNN talking about a 12-year-old girl who had been abducted in Virginia after her mother was killed.
“I stopped and focused on the girl's brown eyes,” said Shanley. She said she recognized those same eyes in the parking lot and saw a lot of pain. The dispatcher asked Shanley to wait until police arrived.
“I was shocked when the officer came over and said, ‘You are right Ms. Shanley. It was her.’”
The girl in the parking lot was 12-year-old Brittany Smith. Her mother, Tina Smith, was found at her home in Roanoke, VA, on December 5, 2010. She had been beaten to death with a baseball bat. Police suspected that houseguest Jeff Easley killed her and took off with her young daughter.
Chuck Mason is the acting Assistant Chief of the Roanoke County Police Department. He was the lieutenant in charge of detectives at the time of the murder investigation and was involved in requesting an AMBER Alert.
“We were striking out. We had no idea where the suspect had gone,” said Mason. “We had to expand beyond law enforcement and needed the public's help.”
The national media picked up on the AMBER Alert on the first day and journalists continued filing updated reports about the search each day. One week after the murder, Mason got a call from the police in San Francisco.
“I would like to say the case was solved by good police work but it was really the media coverage and one woman being observant and remembering the face of the girl,” said Mason. “We may not have found the girl and certainly not as fast as we did. We may have had another body in California.”
Easley pleaded guilty to capital murder and on February 29, 2012, he was ordered to spend the rest of his life in prison. Brittany Smith is living with her father and now considers Shanley and her daughter as part of her family. They all went on a beach vacation together in August.
The Department of Justice recognized Shanley as the AMBER Alert Citizen of the Year. However, she does not consider herself a hero. “I was just doing what anyone should do,” said Shanley. “Law enforcement cannot do it all. We will see more than they will ever see. Listen to your inner voice, and remember it will not do any good unless you make the call. Take that extra moment to make sure a child is ok.”
“We just have to look after the kids,” concluded Shanley. “There are too many kids missing.”