You should read this; the story of what happened to Jimmy Ryce is horrible, but what his family did is put together statistics, and help find a solution to prevent this from happening to other children.

Little Jimmy Ryce was just nine years old when he stepped of his school bus, a short 2/10s of a mile from home. As he walked home, across several neighbor’s front yards, a truck pulled in front of him and blocked his way. The man inside the truck jumped out, grabbed him by the shirt, pointed a gun to his face, and said, “Do you want to die?” The obvious answer Jimmy came up with was, “No. So the man ordered him into the truck and pushed him across to the passenger’s side, ordering him to get down on the floor so nobody would see him. Jimmy took off his backback and held it in front of him like a shield while he knelt on the floor of the passenger’s side of the truck.

Jimmy was taken by ths man to an abandoned trailer a littler over a mile from the bus stop, tormenting and sodomizing Jimmy for hours. Afterwards, when Jimmy tried to escape, the man shot him as he was trying to run out the trailer door.

The killer confessed. Jimmy’s parents discovered afterweards that a bloodhound could have probably saved Jimmy’s life.

Bloodhounds are great scenting trackers. A bloodhound could have smelled Jimmy’s scent on his belongings, like his shoes or his bedsheets, and started from where Jimmy was last known to be–his school bus stop.

A U.S. Department of Justice study shows that over 90 percent of abducted children in the United States who are murdered are killed within 36 hours. A Washington state study claims 90 percent are killed within the first four hours. Whatever the truth is, the goal of the Jimmy Ryce Center for Victims of Predatory Abduction is to locate enough bloodhounds throughout the country to reach within an hour by helicopter anywhere in the United States a child goes missing.

If law enforcement wants to give abducted children in its jurisdiction the best chance of coming home alive, when the fuse is this short, it needs to adopt a protocol in advance for searching for abducted and lost children. Included in the plan must be the bringing in a bloodhound as part of its first response in missing children cases.

Go to the Jimmy Ryce Bloodhound Project and find out more

Thanks to Jo’s Cafe

Stop the ACLU/