Missing Indiana Teen Found Safe in Arkansas, Authorities Say

Stock photo of a police car. (Shutterstock)

Missing Indiana teen Madison Elizabeth Yancy Eddlemon was discovered two states away in Arkansas, it has been reported.

The 16-year-old was believed to be in “extreme danger” after Indiana State Police issued a statewide Amber Alert on Aug. 18 at 6 a.m., Nwitimes.com reported.

The suspect who was said to be involved in her disappearance, Alex Curry-Fishtorn, was found and taken into custody without incident, officials said.

He is now facing stalking charges and a violation of a protective order in Lake County, said Lake County Sheriff Oscar Martinez.

“This positive outcome could only have been possible through the mutual cooperation of both state and federal agencies,” Martinez told the news outlet. “I would like to thank the FBI, in particular FBI GRIT in Lake County, and the numerous other state and local agencies that assisted.”

At around 11:20 a.m. Sunday, Eddlemon’s mother wrote on Facebook, “THEY FOUND HER!!!!!! Safe.” Her grandmother also wrote on Facebook 10 minutes later:  “The FBI has found my granddaughter in Arkansas,” according to the Chicago Sun-Times.

Indianapolis FBI agents assisted Lake County Sheriff’s deputies and FBI agents in Little Rock, Arkansas, with the investigation, KGUN reported.

Before the incident, Eddlemon and her family obtained a protective order against Curry-Fishtorn for stalking, the news outlet reported.

Eddlemon’s mother Nichole Cain said Curry-Fishtorn was controlling, stabbed her, and left bruises on Eddlemon.

“Everyone was on alert,” Cain told ABC7. “We just had to watch her and be with her all the time.”

Cain added that Eddemon “was scared he was going to hurt us, hurt her.”

It was not clear whether Eddlemon was found with Curry-Fishtorn.

Other details about the case are not clear.

Facts About Crime in the United States

Violent crime in the United States has fallen sharply over the past 25 years, according to both the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) and the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) (pdf).

The rate of violent crimes fell by 49 percent between 1993 and 2017, according to the FBI’s UCR, which only reflects crimes reported to the police.

The violent crime rate dropped by 74 percent between 1993 and 2017, according to the BJS’s NCVS, which takes into account both crimes that have been reported to the police and those that have not.

The FBI recently released preliminary data for 2018. According to the Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report, January to June 2018, violent crime rates in the United States dropped by 4.3 percent compared to the same six-month period in 2017.

While the overall rate of violent crime has seen a steady downward drop since its peak in the 1990s, there have been several upticks that bucked the trend. Between 2014 and 2016, the murder rate increased by more than 20 percent, to 5.4 per 100,000 residents, from 4.4, according to an Epoch Times analysis of FBI data. The last two-year period that the rate soared so quickly was between 1966 and 1968.

Missing Children

There were 464,324 missing children reported in the FBI’s National Crime Information Center in 2017, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Under federal law, when a child is reported missing to law enforcement, they must be entered into the database. In 2016, there were 465,676 entries.

“This number represents reports of missing children. That means if a child runs away multiple times in a year, each instance would be entered into NCIC separately and counted in the yearly total. Likewise, if an entry is withdrawn and amended or updated, that would also be reflected in the total,” the center noted.

In 2017, the center said it assisted officers and families with the cases of more than 27,000 missing children. In those cases, 91 percent were endangered runaways, and 5 percent were family abductions.

About one in seven children reported missing to the center in 2017 were likely victims of child sex trafficking.

The number of reported missing children has significantly decreased in recent years, according to a 2017 report by the Department of Justice (pdf). The number of children reported missing dropped from 6.5 per 1,000 children in 1999 to 3.1 per 1,000 in 2013.

Missing children typically fall into five categories: kidnapped by a family member, abducted by a nonfamily perpetrator, runaways, those who got lost, stranded, or injured, or those who went missing due to benign reasons, such as misunderstandings, according to the report researchers.Crime Facts in the United States