Did You Get An Alert About the Festus Amber Alert On Your Phone?

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FESTUS, Mo. (KMOX) — Phones across the St. Louis region remained silent early Thursday morning despite a regional Amber Alert being issued following the disappearance of a 5-month-old boy in Festus.

That alert should have set phones off across the St. Louis area to help spread the word, but a lot of people are saying they never got the message.

What went wrong?

"You want to make sure you have the alerts turned on your phone...many don't," Sergeant Scott White with the Missouri State Highway Patrol explained to KMOX's Brett Blume. "If they did not receive it, I'd definitely check with your service provider for your mobile device."

Another issue Sgt. White points out is that this was not a statewide Amber Alert, but rather a regional one.

"It depends on what carrier you have," Sgt. White continued. "And we get calls from people saying 'this phone went off then' or 'I didn't get it', so it would depend 

Once they're issued locally, Amber Alerts are forwarded to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which resends the message to a network of secondary distributors.

The boy at the center of the Alert, 5-month-old Carl Copeland Jr., was found safe with his mother in south St. Louis.

Related: Search for 5-Month-Old Curt Copeland of Festus is Over