From 9 Months
to 9 Days
Five children missing for nine months.
Found safely in nine days.
Two children with autism.
One community alerted.
A family reunited.
ADAM Program Accelerates Recovery of Missing Children
on the Autism Spectrum
The day everything changed
It was May 27, 2016, when the panic set in. Stephanie Lautner was making the five-hour drive from her hometown of St. Charles, a suburb just outside St. Louis, Missouri, to Willow Springs, a small town in southern Missouri with a population of about 2,000.
She was on her way to pick up her five children, ages 7 to 12, who had been visiting their non-custodial father amid ongoing divorce proceedings. When she arrived at the house, she found it eerily empty. The children's father had taken them, apparently intending to punish her for leaving him. And if that wasn’t horrific enough, two of her children, a son who was 9 years old at the time and another who was 12, have Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), creating an even greater sense of urgency.
“I went banging on the neighbors’ doors for information and one told me that my estranged husband had moved,” Stephanie recalls.
"I frantically called 911 but this small town only had reserve police officers, so I met an officer in a little trailer, and he couldn't take a police report because I didn't have custody paperwork. That ended up becoming the biggest barrier to the whole case because the jurisdiction was not able to get involved without that paperwork."
Left to find them herself
Stephanie, who describes driving around the hills of the Ozark National Forest on her own trying to find her kids, says she later learned that Missouri had recently passed legislation that no longer required custody paperwork to file a missing person’s report in a parental abduction case.
But at the time, she was at the mercy of a system that wasn’t equipped to find her abducted children.
“I ended up hiring an investigator who connected me with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children® (NCMEC),” explains Stephanie.
“While they also had their hands tied because they needed a police report, and law enforcement to enter my children into the FBI’s NCIC (National Crime Information Center) database, I was assigned an NCMEC case worker who was a godsend in advising me of the steps to take to get a police report so that NCMEC could create and distribute the children’s poster and photo.”
After hiring a lawyer and staying relentless, Stephanie’s divorce was granted in February 2017 and she was awarded full custody of her five children — who were still missing.
“The second I left the courthouse, I called the jurisdiction to finally get the police report created so that NCMEC could start doing what they do best and help find my babies,” Stephanie says. “It had been nine months since they were taken.”
ADAM PROGRAM
TO THE RESCUE
On February 16, 2017, NCMEC entered information about Stephanie’s case into the database, and a poster with a photo of her missing children was distributed at the touch of a button — thanks to the Automated Delivery of Alerts on Missing Children (ADAM) Program.
Learn more about the ADAM Program.
On February 25 — only 9 days later —
all five missing kids were found.
“The moment the case was in the hands of NCMEC I felt this
sense of relief because I didn’t have to do it alone anymore,”
describes Stephanie.
“I knew that the only way we were going to get their faces
out there to the public was through NCMEC and the
ADAM Program.”
The Tips That
Brought Them Home
Two people who viewed the posters, immediately recognized the missing children and called the NCMEC hotline. One was a manager of a convenience store that was enrolled in the ADAM Program. She had been flipping through some of the missing child posters they had received and stopped in her tracks.
She called the number on the poster and told NCMEC, “I know these kids. I don’t know where they live but they were just here the other day. I didn’t forget them because it’s February and it was a very cold day and the children weren’t dressed properly.”
The second person, who worked in law enforcement, recognized the children while he was reviewing ADAM posters during his shift and actually knew where the children were living. He told the person on the NCMEC hotline, “I’ll never forget it.
The kids were out there on this property without coats on and one wasn’t even wearing shoes.” The man was able to take authorities directly to the children - who were living on a 14-acre survivalist camp where their non-custodial parent had been keeping them hidden.
"Without the ADAM Program my children
simply would not have been found.
The results speak for themselves: missing for 9 months and found in 9 days after the posters were released. That’s the impact of how well the ADAM Program works in bringing home children who have gone missing or have been taken."
Stephanie Lautner
The Impact When Children on the Spectrum are Lost or Taken
When they were found, Stephanie’s five children were living off-the-grid with the non-custodial parent in an approximately 900-square foot utility shed with no electricity, no bathroom and not even an outhouse. They had been fed only a hunter-gatherer diet, supplemented with eggs from a small flock of chickens on the property, leaving them all infected with parasites. Stephanie reports that her two sons with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) experienced severe regression during the nine-month ordeal, as they were denied the care they needed, including access to medical professionals and ASD therapists.
“My oldest son, who has profound autism, was on a specialized diet before he was abducted because of gastrointestinal issues.
We were treating those issues to ensure he received proper metabolic nourishment, but during those nine months, he became severely nutrient-deprived. My younger son, who is also on the spectrum and has a more Asperger-like diagnosis, was 9 years old when he was taken but returned to me wearing clothes sized for a 3-year-old...”
In addition to an inadequate diet, the disruption to their routines and therapy set the boys back significantly from the tremendous progress they had achieved before their abduction.
“My older son, who was nonverbal until he was 6, had grown accustomed to the routine of going to school and working with a special education coordinator and teachers,” says Stephanie. “But that structure completely disappeared because the children weren’t enrolled in any school while they were taken.”
And by far the scariest part of the ordeal for Stephanie was the fact that her older son loved to wander, like so many children on the spectrum.
“My son had already eloped a couple of times in his young life, so my biggest fear was that he was going to just walk away, especially with the added stressors of being away from me and his routines. Children on the spectrum have a communication processing disorder. They’re highly intelligent but don’t know how to communicate or advocate for themselves. My mind was going in 100 million directions with all my worries of what could happen.”
How NCMEC is Aiding Autism Endangerment and Elopement
There is no way to overstate the added alarm and complexity when a child on the autism spectrum goes missing or is abducted. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC),
1 in 31 is diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) by age 8, and nearly half engage in wandering behavior, placing them at heightened risk when they go missing.