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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.

Yes, there is at least one time for everything...and kids do wander sometimes. I suppose if the pajamas she wore to bed where laying on the floor with the other dirty pajamas..and if it looked like she put on her clothes, I might agree. How many girly girl 7yr olds do you know that actually run around the neighborhood in their pj's?

excerpt from article
A"girly girl" born between two brothers, Danielle van Dam was a little princess from the start. She always loved wearing pretty little dresses, dancing and getting her hair styled. She recently dressed as Tinkerbell for a friend's birthday party. "She enjoys being a little girl," said family friend Paula Call. Danielle's friends and her classmates at Creekside Elementary School describe her as a sweet, quiet girl who laughs a lot. "I think about her every day," Sergey Smirnoff, a 6-year-old classmate, said a few days after her disappearance. "Everybody talks about her. We're trying to figure out how she got lost."

I didn't mention this to insinuate that if she didn't call, people would harass her or question her about it, although you are probably right. People would have picked her apart if she called her friends for help instead of police. As soon as RR said "Swing" it was over, done, they can do no right.

On the other hand, had the LE not leaked the information, the chances of her being criticized over that 911 call would be minimal. She would have been just another hysterical parent, living in a very nice neighborhood, whose daughter was kidnapped.