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I'm sorry, but I really don't understand why it is abnormal to call 911 when your child is missing from her room.

Not just the room..THE ENTIRE HOUSE AND YARD. It's NOT abnormal. If a child, especially 7yrs old is missing from the house..at that age, and the yards and garage are checked... it's time to get help. Time is of the essence, especially in the big cities. Not only do you have to ''wait'' for the cops to get there..but THEN you have to wait for them to do their routine before they declare the child missing themselves. That takes precious time. IF the child is found, everyone's happy, alert or call is over and the police are HAPPY that they don't have to find a missing child. We have alerts that go out over radio, tv news..so people can be on the look out..extra eyes looking for the missing child. So far, the child the record's been great. Mostly runaways over age 12

Kim, my sweet, I understand what you're saying. If, as in this case, a missing child is later found dead people would question, "Why didn't you call police sooner??" HOWEVER, it looks to me from reading BVDs 911 call that she made the call while Damon was supposedly looking in the rest of the house and the garage. That's pretty quick, especially for a very mobile, very friendly 7-year-old who had spend-the-night friends living nearby and lots of playmates on the street--AND on a Saturday morning. Saturdays are MADE for playing with friends! It's a day off of school, and eagerly anticipated all week long. So it is possible, probable, even, that if something were not already rotten in vanDenmark that she very well could have gone out on the sidewalk to draw with chalk, or gone down the street to see if her friends could come over and play, or... a thousand other possibilities not at all unusual for a 7-year-old.

TRUE STORY from last night:
My neighbor two doors down has two little boys, 4 and 7. For some reason, she went to pick up the 7 year old at a friend's house (had to drive to get there, so it wasn't nearby) and left the 4-year-old at home alone, because, as she said later, she didn't think she'd be gone long. But she ended up having to wait for her older son to have to find his shoes at his friend's house before they could return home, and it ended up being about 45 minutes that she was away.

While we were having dinner, she rang our doorbell and asked if Jared (4) was at our house. "No, haven't seen him." "I can't find him in our house." So off we went, kids, hubby, and I, as well as a couple of neighborhood kids, to join her searching for Jared. Our house was the first place she looked, so we started down the street in opposite directions, everybody calling his name. Since everyone else was headed down the street (and the mom stopped at the mailbox at the end of the street to check her mail), I went out back to check behind the houses and the next street. Well, lo and behold, whom to my wandering eye should appear than a little kid on a little bike riding down the street, two streets over from ours. (The mom insists he's not allowed to go off our street, but he did, and he does, all the time.) He had been "officially missing" for about 30 minutes at that point.

Same thing happened last summer with a 3-year-old girl, an age I don't think should be left unsupervised AT ALL, but her mother does all the time. This one had been missing all day, but the mother didn't start looking for her until it was after dark and the girl hadn't come home yet. She was located playing inside the home of a new friend on the next street who had just moved into the neighborhood.

I just think calling police before actually LOOKING for the kid was a red flag, indicating the parents already KNEW something wicked was afoot.