Team to respond to child abductions

Eighty-five people have agreed to take part in the Trumbull County project.

By ED RUNYAN

VINDICATOR TRUMBULL STAFF

NEWTON FALLS — Miriam Fife will speak to those attending the first meeting of the newly formed Trumbull County Child Abduction Response Team on Monday to tell them first-hand the importance of the work they are pledging themselves to.

Fife, the mother of murder victim Raymond Fife of Warren, says the goal of the CART team — assembling experienced and trained personnel and resources to quickly search for a missing child — is close to her heart because of what happened when her 12-year-old son died in 1985.

The boy was riding his bicycle on a path through a wooded area off Palmyra Road on Warren’s west side on his way to a Boy Scout meeting when he was sexually assaulted, beaten, burned and strangled. Danny Lee Hill and Raymond Combs were later convicted of the murder.

A friend of Raymond Fife’s alerted his family that Raymond was missing about 6 p.m., within about 30 minutes of his abduction, and family members began searching for him immediately. The boy’s father, Isaac Fife, found the boy, unconscious, about 9:30 p.m. The boy died two days later.

Miriam Fife knows that police policies have changed in the years since her son died. But when Raymond disappeared in 1985, her family went to police to report him missing, and police were unwilling to look for him because not enough time had passed.

“In 1985, the response was that he was a 12-year-old boy, and 12-year-olds get sidetracked,” Mrs. Fife said.

Mrs. Fife supports the work of the new CART team and has pledged to serve as liaison between the searchers and the family of a missing child.

She said she believes its work is important because the first few hours are critical when a child has been abducted.

“I don’t know if that [a CART team] would have saved him [Raymond], but what it might have avoided was having my husband find him and going through the trauma that he went through,” she said.

Dallas Young, a Trumbull County deputy sheriff and the Trumbull CART on-scene coordinator, said the goal of the organization is to mobilize 60 to 100 people within the first half-hour after a child comes up missing.

CART, a national organization started in Florida in 2004 after the abduction of 11-year-old Carlie Brucia of Sarasota, tries to make it possible to tap into a variety of resources, such as a civilian K-9 search unit (available in Ashtabula County) and reverse 911 (calls to citizens from the county 911 center notifying the public of a missing child), or even satellite images from NASA, Young said.

Newton Township Patrolman Tom Colosimo, the team’s Trumbull County coordinator, said neither Trumbull nor Mahoning County has ever had a child abduction response team.

He attended a CART meeting early last year and decided to start one here. The Trumbull team plans to assist Mahoning County whenever needed, he said.

“It’ll get boots on the ground and expedite the [finding] of a juvenile or child,” he said. “If an abductor is going to kill a child, it’s done in the first three hours,” Colosimo said.

The Trumbull County team is one of 20 in the state.

Colosimo said there are 85 members of the team so far, consisting of police officers, firefighters, prosecuting attorneys, probation officers and others.

Young has received training in how to do a “grid search,” which is an organized way of searching an area, such as woods, for a missing person. He got some experience in using his training in the Canton area last June, when pregnant woman Jesse Davis, 26, disappeared. Davis was later found dead, and Canton police officer Bobby Cutts Jr. was charged with killing her.

Diane Barber, an assistant county prosecutor and head of the Child Assault Prosecution Unit, said she is aware of only two abduction cases that have occurred in Trumbull County in the last 10 years: the rape and murder of 10-year-old Bridget Wetzl in 1999 and the attempted abduction of a Newton Falls girl last month.

runyan@vindy.com