Amber Hagerman Abduction 30 Years Later – Tragedy Leads to Solution

posted on 1.12.2026

This week marks the 30th anniversary of a tragic event in the DFW area, the abduction of 9-year-old Amber Hagerman. The young Arlington girl and her brother were riding bikes when she was abducted on Jan. 13, 1996. 

“He heard her scream before he looked to see what was going on. And so, he didn't have a whole lot of time to focus and gather what was happening. The suspect had her around the waist, put her in it, threw her in his truck, and drove off. And that's all we knew," former Arlington Police spokesman Dee Anderson told KXAS-TV recently.  Hagerman’s body was found four days later in a creek. The murder remains unsolved.

The tragedy, however, led to a broadcast solution to aid in the search for abducted children, the AMBER EAS child abduction alert named in Hagerman’s honor. It later became an acronym for America’s Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response as a tribute to Hagerman. 

A listener of a KDMX Dallas-Fort Worth radio talk show wrote a letter asking if there was anything broadcasters could do to alert the public to kidnappings. Members of the Association of Radio Managers, put aside their intense competition in the Dallas-Fort Worth market and in 1997 came up with the idea of using stations' EAS equipment to alert the public to kidnapping of children. 

Broadcasters thought EAS would be ideal to quickly relay abduction information to a broad audience with many eyes to assist in first responders in the search for a missing child. They shared their plan with Anderson who agreed.

The Primary EAS stations in the Dallas-Fort Worth market, WBAP and KRLD, agreed to immediately air messages about abducted children in situations that meet certain criteria. The broadcasters worked with police to develop criteria and guidelines that became the template for other cities in Texas and then other states to develop their own AMBER plans. Other radio stations in the market soon agreed to immediately rebroadcast AMBER alerts or to broadcast the information to their audiences as quickly as possible. DFW television stations agreed to air the alerts and information as well. 

The criteria were designed to eliminate family custody disputes and speed up dissemination of information about kidnappings within the critical first three hours to an area where public participation has the most chance of locating a missing child. Broadcasters initially used the Civil Emergency Message (CEM) EAS event code for AMBER alerts, but the FCC later created the Child Abduction Emergency (CAE) EAS event code for use in AMBER alerting.

The program was an immediate success. In 1998, the first AMBER alert led to a successful recovery and prosecution in Arlington. Rae-Leigh Bradbury was returned to her parents in Arlington, as a direct result of the AMBER alert broadcast by KRLD radio. Bradbury was just two months old when she was abducted by a drug addict. Police recovered the child less than half an hour after a KRLD listener heard the AMBER alert and spotted the kidnapper driving right in front of him. 

Others soon took notice of the AMBER alert’s promise. In 2000, Joann Donnellan joined the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) to lead an effort to take AMBER alerts nationwide. She was working at the "America's Most Wanted" television show when the Dallas-Fort Worth AMBER plan began drawing favorable publicity across the country. Donnellan held a forum with Anderson, DFW broadcasters, and representatives of five other AMBER plans existing in August 2000. By October 2001, NCMEC kicked off a program to launch AMBER nationwide. 

In August 2002 Gov. Rick Perry established, by executive order, a Texas State AMBER Plan and directed the Texas Department of Public Safety to take responsibility for investigating child abductions and issuing alerts to areas of the state that do not have local AMBER plans in place. Two days later Abilene police issued the first state-wide alert. The alert led to the rescue of one-month-old Nancy Crystal Chavez after she was kidnapped from her mother’s car in a parking lot.

In 2003, President George W. Bush signed into law a proposal by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, to create a national AMBER plan framework to help the 92 AMBER Alert programs existing then and to ensure a seamless network to protect children in those areas without local AMBER plans. The creation of local AMBER plans, however, continues across the country to this day.

From the tragedy of Hagerman’s abduction 30 years ago this week, an emergency messaging tool was born, one created by Texas broadcasters to help the community. It is now credited with the successful recovery of more than a thousand children across the country. 

NCMEC, which tracks child abduction cases nationally said as of Dec. 18, 2025, 1,292 children had been recovered due to the activation of an AMBER Alert. 

Questions? Contact TAB’s Michael Schneider or call (512) 322-9944.

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