News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
Social media outlets give the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office more opportunities to recover runaway teenagers in the area.
That according to Public Information Officer Sergeant Gary Howard.
“The world we live in today is digital and the generation that I am dealing with most of the time, they are able to text,” Howard said. “They are able to communicate through digital social media better than they are to set down face to face. So I found that a lot of people will contact me through those different media.”
Cumberland County has investigated 15 runaway teenager cases this year. Howard said social media makes him readily available to the teenagers.
“I also find that people find it very easy to contact me as the face of the sheriff’s office in those circumstances through that social media,” Howard said. “So I made it easy on them. Whatever their platform is that they want to speak [on] I tried to set something up that they will be able to contact me easy and speak to me easy.”
Cumberland County has recovered all 15 runaway teenagers this year. (Photos: Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office Facebook)
Howard said many steps go into recovering a missing runaway.
“What I do is after 30 minutes to an hour, I contact the parents and then I will go through a battery of questions that probably the patrol didn’t ask. I want to know different things about them,” Howard said. “Friends they might be with, any kind of information that they may be able to provide for me that will give me an idea of how I can start proceeding on an investigation.”
Howard said he then generates a poster that he posts on social media and sent to neighboring law enforcement agencies.
“All the information about a missing runaway is sent to all the SRO’s in every school so that they will know about them as well. So that any information that kind of flows through the schools through the student population can come to us as well,” Howard said. “We will go and we will interview as many people as we have leads on and we will follow every lead that we can to try to determine the location of that child.”
Once the agencies recover the missing teen, Howard said he interviews the teenager about why he or she ran away.
“Sometimes, I have determined after interviewing the teenagers and so forth, that they are either running to something or they are running away from something,” Howard said. “‘ Sometimes they are running away because they feel that they have outgrown their homes and they are just wanting to be adults.”
Howard said abuse and bullying often contribute to teenagers running away.
“It is an extremely dangerous world out here. From human trafficking to all kinds of different things that are very scary,” Howard said. “I would recommend that before you decide to run away to solve your problems, look to see if there are other avenues that you can find to be able to help you with that.”
All 15 Cumberland County runaway teens have been recovered.
Howard said the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office is still looking for one missing adult, Parker Colin Morris. Morris has been missing since October 2018.
If anyone has information concerning Morris, please contact the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office.
