Positivity: An Amber Alert Works

And it worked very quickly (Original New York Times article is behind subscriber wall; excerpt is from Good News Blog):

Girl Is Rescued 2 Hours After Abduction

A 13-year-old Rockland County girl was kidnapped yesterday by three masked people when she stepped off a school bus in Spring Valley and was rescued about two hours later from the trunk of a stolen car, the police said.

The abduction set off a regional Amber Alert for the girl, Mara D. Downes. An anonymous caller led the police to the car, which was parked behind an apartment building less than two miles away from where Mara was abducted. She was inside, shaken but unhurt.

The police said the kidnappers, whom witnesses described as two men and a woman in their late teens and early 20’s, had not yet been found, and it was not clear if they had a relationship with Mara.

Investigators took a computer from Mara’s house to see if she had used it to communicate with them.

The car, a gold Toyota Camry, had been reported missing from a gas station on April 5, the police said.

About 3 p.m., Mara, an eighth grader at Sacred Heart School in nearby Suffern, was returning from school.

As she stepped off a yellow school bus near her home on Trinity Avenue, her abductors grabbed her by the arms and legs, while two neighbors watched.

She struggled with her kidnappers. “She was screaming, ‘Help me! Help me!’ ” said Maggay Eugene, 40, who said she saw the abduction from her steps as she was getting her mail. After her abductors put her in the trunk, they had to try to close it four or five times before it would lock.

Another woman, Akosua Osei-Mensah, said she had been driving to her parents’ home on the same block when she saw two of the three kidnappers holding the flailing girl by the arms.

She followed the Toyota as it sped south on Trinity Avenue, crossed a double yellow line into oncoming traffic, then darted across the intersection with East Eckerson Road, she said.

“I didn’t really know what was going on, but I kept following them until I was able to get the license plate,” said Ms. Osei-Mensah, who goes to nursing school at the University at Buffalo. “I figured the girl needed help.”

A description of Mara and the car was quickly broadcast on radio and television, and flashed on digital highway signs.

The anonymous tip led the police to a two-story beige multifamily house on Homer Lee Avenue, just off Main Street and about a mile from the scene of the kidnapping, the police said.

Alain Sandaire, co-owner of Rockland Used Car Inc., an auto body shop across the street, said he was fixing a car in the yard when he heard a police officer yell into his radio, “The car is in the back and the girl is in the trunk.”

Within minutes, Mara emerged from an alley next to the house, flanked by two officers, disheveled and seemingly distraught, Mr. Sandaire and two other witnesses said.

“Her hair was messed up. Her hands were over her face,” said Lisa Pennington, 17, who was also at the body shop. “The girl was trying to speak, but nothing was coming out. She was just crying.”

Mara was taken to Good Samaritan Hospital in Suffern as a precaution, her family said.