WWTBAM Bored

Last night, during primetime programming, they started scrolling information about a missing three year-old girl. Then, they started breaking into programming with updates of the search for the girl who wandered away from her apartment. The mother noticed that she did not come into the partment with her 4 and 5 year-old sisters around 5:45, and I did not hear about it until around 9:00 pm. (I did feel the urge to travel down to the area and help look, as it was the area where my wife and I lived right after we got married.) Luckily, after 4 hours of searching, it turns out that the little girl had gone to a family frined's apartment nearby. Amazingly, no one checked there. The family friend apparently never turned on the television or noticed the huge amount of people searching in the area, and the mother never called the places where her daughter had stayed in the past.

http://www.omaha.com/index.php?u_page=2 ... d=10280156

There were a few odd aspects to the story. The affiliate stations for CBS, NBC, and ABC all reported vastly different heights for the girl. One said that she was 2'6" (which is shorter than my one year-old), one said that she was 3'0", and the last said that she was 3'6". They also differed on whether to just call her "African-American" or "light-skinned African-American." Finally, there were some questions about why an Amber Alert had not been declared after the search hit the three hour mark. Then, suddenly, there were reports that some of the children saw Manya (the little girl) get into a blue van.

On the positive side, the mother says that she has "learned her lesson about leaving such young children alone."