Published: September 01, 2007 06:54 pm         

STEPHANIE SALTER: Amber Alert guidelines different since local slaying

Editor’s note: This is the first column in a three-part series by Stephanie Salter on the June 13, 2006, abduction and killing of 4-year-old Collin Walker, allegedly by his father. The first two articles deal with the events of that day, with particular focus on why it took so long for an Amber Alert to be issued. Part 3 describes the hurdles Collin’s mother, Teresa Walker, has faced over the last 14 months as she has tried to reconstruct her life and nurture her surviving son, Monte.



By Stephanie Salter

Terre Haute Tribune-Star

TERRE HAUTE — The national Amber Alert broadcast system was named for a 9-year-old Texas child who was kidnapped and murdered in 1996 by a stranger. A significant word change in Indiana’s 2007 Amber Alert guidelines should be named for 4-year-old Collin Walker, who was taken by force and allegedly murdered in June 2006 by his own father.

Collin’s mother, Teresa Walker of Terre Haute, wants every law enforcement agent — from uniformed beat cops to sheriffs and chiefs of police — to be aware of the change and to understand the tragedy that separates the 2006 guidelines from the current version.

“I can’t just let Collin’s death be in vain, without anything coming from it,” she said. “When children and weapons are involved, it can’t be OK to say, ‘Well, that’s their father.’”

Collin was stabbed to death June 13, 2006, near a fishing lake in the Blackhawk area of southeastern Vigo County. His little brother, Monte, then nearly 3, also was slashed and stabbed, but he survived after being flown by medical helicopter to Riley Children’s Hospital at Indianapolis.

The boys’ father, Katron Walker, 34, has been in custody since the night of the incident, charged with Collin’s murder and the attempted murder of Monte. At a pre-trial conference last month before Judge David Bolk in Superior Court Division 3, Walker’s court-appointed attorneys said his defense will be “not guilty by reason of mental defect or disease.”

A lengthy psychiatric evaluation will further delay the start of a trial for several months, possibly until autumn 2008. The Vigo County Prosecutor will ask for the death penalty if a conviction is won.

Teresa Walker has not seen her husband in person since June 11 of last year when she took her sons from the couple’s home and fled to a women’s shelter operated by the Council On Domestic Abuse. The next day, she filed for an emergency protective order against him, which covered her and the children.

The following morning, a 911 call from Teresa Walker’s father reported that Katron Walker had taken his two boys at knifepoint from their grandfather’s home, kicking and punching the older man and Teresa’s aunt when they tried to stop him.

What Katron Walker apparently did not do that morning was directly and specifically threaten his sons.

That seemingly filamental distinction — combined with the then-wording in Indiana’s Amber Alert guidelines and with traditional police assumptions about custody disputes — stood between Teresa Walker’s first pleas for an Amber broadcast and the issuance of the alert some seven hours later.

The 5-year-old Indiana Amber Alert Plan is the creation of the state government, the Indiana State Police, the Indiana Sheriffs’ Association, the Association of Indiana Chiefs of Police, and the Indiana Broadcasters Association. To a casual reader, the plan’s 2006 guidelines for issuing an Amber Alert don’t look much different from the 2007 version. The four qualifying criteria are still the same:

1. A missing child must be under 18.

2. The child must be believed to have been abducted and in danger of serious bodily harm or death.

3. There must be enough descriptive information to believe the broadcast will help.

4. The request for an alert must be recommended by the law enforcement agency of jurisdiction.

Further down in the guidelines, though, a subtle but major difference now exists. In the 2006 version, this sentence appears twice, the first time just below criterion No. 4:

“Missing adults, runaways and children taken in custody disputes do NOT qualify for Amber Alert activation.”

The 2007 version reads:

“Missing adults and runaways do NOT qualify for Amber Alert activation in Indiana. Children taken in child custody disputes generally will not qualify for an Amber Alert unless there is credible information indicating a child may be in imminent danger of serious bodily injury or death.”

Terre Haute police, who never had been involved in an Amber Alert request before the Walker case, were operating under the first version, which appears to prohibit an Amber consideration for what the U.S. Department of Justice calls “family abductions.”

Like cops everywhere, they also were operating under a long-held and fairly fixed notion of the benign way in which nearly all family abductions play out.

“We have custody abductions all the time. The number of complaints at Christmas — the phone is ringing off the wall,” said Capt. Brent Johnson, a 24-year veteran of the Indiana State Police post here in Vigo County, and now commander of ISP Area 5 in Indianapolis.

Johnson still was assigned to the local post, part of Area 3, when Collin Walker was killed. Two of his men received national awards of commendation this year for their efforts in the capture of Katron Walker and the rescue of little Monte. The case was also the local ISP post’s first Amber Alert request.

In a recent analysis, Johnson said, state law enforcement officials found that thousands of Amber Alerts would be issued each year in Indiana if every custody abduction complaint were included. Such a flood would render the highly effective public warning system virtually useless.

Designed to use citizens as the “eyes and ears” of law enforcement, Amber Alerts work because they are strictly controlled and rare. U.S. Justice Department handouts emphasize that the system was created for stranger abductions.

The difficulty comes for local police and deputies who must make a judgment call and formally request an Amber Alert in non-stranger cases. It is they, said Johnson, who must determine, “When does a custodial abduction cross the line?”

Given the mass of family abduction cases cops see that don’t end in violence, their inclination is not toward envisioning a worst-case scenario like the Walker case. Even Katron Walker’s violent behavior toward his in-laws and his possession of a knife did not constitute an explicit threat of “serious bodily harm or death” to his children under Amber Alert requirements: He had not specifically threatened his boys when he took them.

“It all goes back to, you just don’t expect a parent to do that to their children,” said Johnson.

Teresa Walker expected something terrible. Her fear had led her to the women’s shelter and the emergency protective order. One of the incidents listed on her request for that order described an argument during which Walker said she told her husband to leave their home.

“He picked up Collin stating he wasn’t leaving without him,” the request recounts. “I told him to put him down or I would call police. He said, ‘By the time they get here they will have a big mess to clean up.’”

But in the early hours of the mother’s day-long effort to get an Amber Alert issued, the brand new protective order was not yet in any law enforcement computer system. By the time police asked for and received a photo copy — and the court that had granted it reopened after an hour closed for lunch — it was past 1 p.m.

Terre Haute Police Chief George Ralston, who declined to discuss most of the details of the Walker case, said no one in his department took Teresa Walker’s accounts lightly.

As soon as Walker’s father called 911 to report the morning abduction, the police department responded with an all-points-bulletin to local law enforcement agencies to be on the lookout for Katron Walker and his sons.

Ralston’s officers and detectives worked throughout the day with Indiana State Police to provide information to the Missing Children Clearinghouse, the chief said.

But Teresa Walker and Catherine Saunders, a co-worker at St. Mary-of-the-Woods College who accompanied her the entire day, say they often felt as if they were speaking another language to police. Despite her father’s description of the knifepoint seizure of the children, Walker said she could not seem to convey the degree of crisis to anyone who listened to her account or interviewed her for a report.

“They kept saying it was a custody issue and that he was the biological father and had every right to have his children,” she said.

More than once during the nightmarish hours that she, Saunders and Saunders’ attorney husband shuttled among local law enforcement offices, begging at each stop for an Amber Alert, Walker said she was told, “They’ll be home by dinner. This happens all the time.”



Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.

     

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