A ground-breaking smart-phone app designed to help locate missing children received an unexpected test run when three-year-old Kienan Hebert was abducted from his Sparwood home, the Missing Children’s Society of Canada says.
A modified version of Poynt, a free smart-phone app that uses GPS technology to help people locate businesses and other services, the society's “Poynt push system” was due to be unveiled at press conference in Courtenay on Monday afternoon marking the 33rd birthday of Lindsey Nicholls, a local teen who disappeared in August, 1993, and has never been found.
But when police issued an amber alert last Wednesday in Kienan’s disappearance, the Missing Children’s Society of Canada went live with the new app, relaying vital information about the child and his suspected abductor to more than 7,000 smart-phone users in British Columbia and Alberta with the push of a button.
“The Poynt app allows us to, immediately and in real time, issue child search alerts to as many as a million Poynt users in Canada,” Amanda Pick, the society’s executive director, said on Monday. “We can also send the alert to specific geographic areas within a kilometre of where that child was last seen or abducted from.”
Poynt users in specific regions receive an alert on their smart phones and can see all available information about a missing child believed to be in the area.
It’s the first time anywhere this type of technology has been used in a search for a missing child, Ms. Pick said.
Kienan Hebert was anonymously returned to his home early Sunday morning after an intense search and public pleas from the boy’s distraught parents to Sparwood resident Randall Hopley, who is suspected of abducting Kienan.
Ms. Pick said there’s no way of telling what role technology played in the child’s safe return, but stressed the importance of taking away an abductor’s anonymity in missing- children cases and making them feel like “there’s nowhere to go.”
Officials from Poynt, a well-established application, who have more than 10-million users in eight countries, approached the society about modifying the app for use in searches for missing children.
Lindsey Nicholls’s mother Judy Peterson, who attended the Monday press conference, said her daughter’s disappearance might have had a happier outcome if today’s communications tools had been available.
“When Lindsey disappeared, the newspaper printed some information, but that was a week or two later,” Ms. Peterson recalled. “Then I walked downtown with my printed poster and my roll of scotch tape and put up posters, so it’s a lot different than sending out electronic notifications like today.”
Lindsey Nicholls was living in a foster home on Royston Road when she disappeared at age 14. She was last seen walking toward Courtenay wearing blue jeans, white runners and a khaki top.
Ted Davis, an investigator with the society, said the file on Lindsey’s disappearance has been handed over to RCMP homicide investigators, who still consider it an open case.
A Poynt alert about Lindsey went out to users across the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island Monday in hopes that someone will come forward with information.
Ms. Pick said the society is seeking approval to become an official broadcaster of amber alerts. Last week RCMP were criticized for waiting nine hours to issue an amber alert in Kienan Hebert’s disappearance.
