Amber's legacy: Her slaying inspired a life saving alert

Dallas Morning News: It's impossible to fathom the depth of emotion that stirs Amber Hagerman's mother when she hears that another missing child has triggered an Amber Alert.
"Bittersweet," Donna Norris calls it.
Sorrow makes another unwanted visit -- sorrow for the loss of her 9-year-old daughter Amber, slain after a stranger snatched her from her bicycle in Arlington, Texas, 10 years ago.
Softening that blow is the hope that the alert bearing Amber's name can avert more tragedy.
The now-familiar warning -- a jarring siren sound that blares from radios and televisions -- is a regular reminder just how dangerous and complicated a world our children grow up in.
Grown-ups talk wistfully about their childhoods, about pedaling the neighborhood and adult-free days in the park. The Amber Alert argues for reality. It's now a world of registered sex offenders who live around the corner. It's a world that keeps tally of children who go missing.
The statistics are as nerve-jangling as the Amber Alert. Non-family abductions reached 58,000 kids in 1999, the most recent year studied by the U.S. Justice Department. And 115 other children were victims of serious "stereotypical kidnappings" -- the kind that led to Amber's unsolved murder.
Critical element
Research also reveals the critical element of time. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children cites a finding out of Washington that "74 percent of abducted children who are murdered are dead within three hours of the abduction."
That means it's critical to do everything possible to spread word of abductions quickly and try to save a young life.
The effort works. The center for missing children details dozens of Amber Alert success stories on its Web site (missingkids.com).
It's indeed a bittersweet world. The lifesaving alert system spawned by Dallas-Fort Worth broadcasters and police agencies is replicated today in 50 states and commemorated in a new postage stamp.
All in the name of a little girl who's not around today to see it.