FBI trains city police; Instructors in town to teach Nevada officers how to investigate child kidnapping.

Investigators participating in a child abduction training session go door to door in Fairground Estates in Nevada and question neighbors about a missing girl on Wednesday morning, Sept. 12. The training exercise was sponsored by the Nevada Police Department and conducted by FBI agents from several states.(Rusty Murry/Herald-Tribune)

In towns and cities large and small, children go missing all too often. To help combat the trend, law enforcement agencies have developed training courses and strategies for ensuring a fast, effective response to this scenario.

More than two dozen sheriff's deputies, police officers and FBI agents were in Nevada this week participating in one of those training sessions, sponsored by the Nevada Police Department. FBI training personnel from as far away as Louisiana and Pennsylvania conducted the classes at First Baptist Church, 301 E. Highland Ave., so local law enforcement agencies will be better prepared to respond to a real abduction.

When they reported for class Wednesday, officers found a child abduction simulation under way. They learned that a 14-year-old girl had left her family's home in Nevada and was headed to school on her bicycle when she went missing.

The scenario had been set up over a period of days and there were several people involved. Nevada Police Sgt. Jeff Baker was largely responsible for putting the whole thing together and he said it took a lot of cooperation to get it off the ground. Baker was a student in a similar training session last year in Arkansas.

Baker said Carol Branham of the Nevada Housing Authority let officers use Fairground Estates as a crime scene and enlisted the help of local residents. Several people played roles in the real-time investigation.

Officers began by establishing a perimeter around the scene and setting up a chain of command and command post. An information officer was designated to handle media inquiries and officers fanned out to interview neighbors, search their residences and establish who should and should not be in the area. Investigators searched the immediate area for physical evidence.

Regular press conferences were held to relay new information to the media. The first public information came out at 9:30 a.m. when police released the victim's name, age, description and circumstances of her disappearance. Later information revealed that the victim's bike had been found and that investigators had several leads they were working on. The public information officer told reporters just after lunch that they had a suspect and vehicle description and direction of travel they obtained from a convenience store video. Investigators continued to follow all leads.

Just after the information from the video was released, investigators located the suspect vehicle and took the role playing suspect into custody. During interrogation, the suspect agreed to take investigators to the make-believe victim's body. The exercise came to a close in an all too familiar fashion. Many real life child abduction cases come to the same end. It sometimes takes investigators days, weeks or months to carry the investigation that far. In this training exercise, it only took six hours.