A new missing children alert system is one step closer to becoming law, as the state House of Representatives has unanimously passed the "Athena Alert" bill.
The Athena Alert is named for Athena Strand, the seven-year-old Wise County girl who was abducted from her own driveway and murdered late last year, allegedly by a FedEx contract driver who was delivering her Christmas present.
On the evening when Athena was taken from her driveway, an Amber Alert could not be issued right away.
"That alert couldn't go out for a day, because there was still not confirmation she had been abducted," says Benson Varghese, the attorney for Athena's mother, Maitlyn Gandy.
That's when the Athena Alert would be issued.
"The Athena Alert, therefore, tries to get into those situations where we don't know the child has been abducted yet, but we know the child is missing," says Varghese. "And instead of sending out a statewide alert, we're sending out a localized or regional alert -- that would be either the county the child is known to be missing from an the bordering counties or a 100-mile radius."
The bill is House Bill 3556, and it was written by Republican Lynn Stucky of Sanger.
"I would like to thank Rep. Stucky and other lawmakers for their support of an Athena Alert in honor of my daughter," said Maitlyn Gandy, Athena's mother. "An Athena Alert will give law enforcement the ability to quickly notify the local public about a missing child in their area, even if the case doesn't meet the strict criteria for a statewide AMBER Alert.
"If a localized alert had been issued as soon as Athena went missing, it could have made a difference," Gandy continued. "We will never know, but I do know that I never want another parent to feel the helplessness that I felt. Law enforcement wanted to sound an alert; but under the current law's criteria, they just couldn't."
It will now go to the state Senate, where it will be carried by Republicans Tan Parker of Flower Mound and Angela Paxton of McKinney.
Assuming it passes in the Senate, it will then be sent to Gov. Abbott's desk for his signature.
"What we heard when Maitlyn went down to Austin to testify at the committee level over and over again is this is a common sense bill," Varghese says. "It doesn't cost the taxpayers anything additional, because these are systems that are already in place. And we've even heard folks ask, 'Why isn't this already the law?'"
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