Almost immediately after authorities declared an Amber Alert in
an effort to find abducted Morgan Hill infant Mariana Corona, local
and state officials employed every method in their capacity to
notify residents.
Almost immediately after authorities declared an Amber Alert in an effort to find abducted Morgan Hill infant Mariana Corona, local and state officials employed every method in their capacity to notify residents.
One of the efforts used by the city was by a recorded “robo-call” to about 77,000 residents and businesses within 10 miles of the site of the car theft and kidnapping at St. Catherine’s Catholic Church on Peak Avenue, according to Morgan Hill director of emergency services Jennifer Ponce.
Every land line account that’s part of the local 911 database from just north of Bailey Avenue to southern Gilroy received two such recorded messages through the AlertSCC system, Ponce explained.
The first message, sent out shortly after the 2 p.m. abduction, asked recipients to be aware of any vehicle on the roads matching that of the off-white Infiniti sedan in which Corona was last seen, and to call police if the car was seen. The message included a detailed description of the car, the child and the location from which both were reported missing.
Then, about 6:50 p.m., after Corona was found safely in the same car which had been abandoned in a Salinas park, Ponce sent out a follow-up recording to the same phone numbers as before to let people know the Amber Alert had expired.
“I just wanted to close the loop with our citizens,” Ponce explained Wednesday.
Morgan Hill was among the first cities in Santa Clara County to roll out the AlertSCC system in 2009. Previous uses of the system included phone notifications in response to a sexual assault that occurred on Half Road in December 2009, and a number of mountain lion sightings in Morgan Hill over the last couple of years.
The alert system allows its operators to target phone numbers within a specified geographical area around the incident in question. Mobile phone users and those who wish to receive text messages indicating a relevant emergency or threat have to sign up to receive such communications via the AlertSCC website.
Tuesday’s incident, however, marked the most extensive use of AlertSCC to date, Ponce said. The city used the 911 database of land lines and addresses to notify people to be on the lookout for the missing child and vehicle.
Use of that database requires more stringent criteria than the 411 listings previously used in Morgan Hill. One of those requirements is “imminent danger to life or property,” and Ponce said a missing infant in the hands of an alleged criminal stranger clearly qualified under that criteria.
“We did get a lot of positive response from the community,” Ponce said.
The local system has the capacity to send the phone recordings to every account in Santa Clara County, but Ponce thought with more than 1 million phone numbers such an effort could have overloaded the system.
Other methods to get the word out about the Amber alert ranged from wide-reaching and generic to hands-on and local.
The California Highway Patrol immediately posted information about the child and vehicle on electronic highway billboard signs along U.S. 101 and other freeways, said Morgan Hill police records supervisor Patti Yinger.
Plus, city staff sent out numerous press releases to area news outlets, and Capt. Joe Sampson made numerous phone calls to the media. Authorities also began circulating a Critical Reach flyer containing information about the stolen car and missing child to local businesses, hospitals, schools, media organizations and other interested parties, Yinger said.
And on a more routine level, police notified other law enforcement agencies in the area, and put out a “be on the lookout” notification to police departments and sheriff’s offices all over the state.
“There were a lot of notifications that went out. It was a saturation that had a happy ending,” Yinger said.
