More than 70 officers from nearly two dozen Brazos Valley law enforcement agencies descended on Navasota to conduct a day-long child abduction exercise.
It was coordinated by the BV CART, which stands for Child Abduction Rescue Team, says Navasota Police Investigator Christie Tucker. She says the actual call came in to the NPD at 8:30 in the morning, when our officers responded to the scene, and everybody was gone and on their way back to their respective agencies by 4.
And because the scenario included escaping through a treeline, Tucker says the 8-year-old local girl whose parents agreed to let her take part was sent over to Stacy Street and through to the park area back toward the creek where the treeline is.
She was instructed to walk through the field with some personal items of hers, leaving what we call a scent trail for the tracking dogs to look for. Also the person playing the abductor walk through the field as well, to simulate someone chasing after her.
These sorts of exercises are critically important, Tucker tells Navasota News, because there’s usually not a lot of time to save an abducted child.
If an abducted child is to be killed, she says, statistically it happens within the first three hours. And agencies such as Navasota don’t have enough manpower to mount the kind of response that’s needed in a situation like that.
Tucker says the exercise provided the Navasota Police with a lot of valuable information that might just save a life, should a real Navasota child be abducted.
