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American Morning

How Was Florida Newspaper Able to Find Nine Missing Children?

Aired August 12, 2002 - 09:31   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: On to the issue of the debate in Florida about the welfare agency there, Florida child welfare officials have been under intense scrutiny since they acknowledged in April that 5- year-old Rilya Wilson had been missing over a year. She is still missing, as are more than 500 children the agency says it can't even account for. So, how was a Florida newspaper able to find nine such missing children, some in under three hours? "The Florida Sun- Sentinel" of Fort Lauderdale examined two dozen cases of children declared missing by the agency, and published their remarkable results on Sunday.
Joining us now to discuss the paper's success, Sally Kestin, the lead investigative reporter on the project.

Good morning. Thanks for joining us.

SALLY KESTIN, "THE FLORIDA SUN-SENTINEL": Thank you.

ZAHN: So what inspired you to take on this project?

KESTIN: As you mentioned, the story about Rilya Wilson was a huge news event in Florida, brought attention to all of these children who are supposed to be many supervision of state's child protection system. And on any given day, there's more than 500 of them who are missing.

Now some of those children have run away from foster homes, some of them have been abducted by parents who shouldn't have had custody, and in each of these cases, these are children who have been abused or neglected, and so obviously, their safety is somewhat in question. And some of these children have been missing for as long as 10, 12, even 14 years, and the state simply doesn't know where they were.

So we decided to take a look , because having covered this for a number of years, we knew that these cases were not a high priority, and we decided to take a look at some of the children to see if it was possible to find them, and it was, if it was easy. Of course we proved that was the case.

We found nine of the 24 children that we set out to look for. One of them had been unaccounted for by the state for eight years. And we did this just of course in a few weeks using public records and doing basic reporting.

ZAHN: Help the American public understand this morning how it was, and even a case where someone had gone missing for eight years, you were able to find him and five to six weeks. I know you said you pored through public documents, but what are you doing that the Child Welfare Agency isn't?

KESTIN: I think the only conclusion that you can draw here is that these children, as well as possibly many of the other 500 children, could be found easily. And nobody is really looking aggressively for them. I think that's what we found. Again, we don't have subpoena powers, we don't have many of the tools available to law enforcement, and yet we were able to just go knock and doors, and use public records and talk to relatives and neighbors, and we tracked them down relatively easy.

One of them we found in under three hours. The child that was missing for eight years, we found by talking to two relatives and a friend and calling directory assistance, and we found that child in a little more than a day.

ZAHN: I guess I'm still not clear on what the problem is. Are these folks lazy in this department, or they haven't been trained to be more assertive?

KESTIN: I think there's a number of factors that play into this? Certainly the workload is one issue. And right now, there's about 750 vacancies of child welfare positions in Florida. So consequently, the workers on the job are handling double, triple, the recommended case loads, and they have enough on their plate to try to keep up with the demands of the kids they know where they are.

So it's just not a high-priority for them to be doing what we did and go knocking on doors when they've got other children to see and court appearances, et cetera, another problem we ran into is that we have got a very detailed policy on what they're supposed to do with missing children, but they' re not following it.

(INTERRUPTED BY LIVE EVENT)

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