Mexico Masons Sponsor Child ID Program 4/22/06, MX
Thursday, April 20, 2006 Mexico Masons sponsor child ID program Saturday by ZACH MORTICE Published: Thursday, April 20, 2006 12:27 PM CDT On Saturday, Mexico parents will have the opportunity to assemble a packet of information that can give law enforcement officers all the critical information they need to locate a child in an abduction emergency. The event, the Masonic Children's Foundation Child Identification Program (CHIP), is sponsored by the local Hebron Masonic Lodge and will take place from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday at the Mexico Junior High School. Parents are invited to bring children of all ages to be documented and then receive a packet with a photo ID, physical description information, dental and DNA records and fingerprints. All information comes both hard copy and on a computer disk. There is no charge for any of these services. The only information the Masonic Lodge retains is a permission slip from the parents authorizing the packet. This information is meant to leave a trail of evidence for law enforcement agents to follow in case a child goes missing or is abducted. Local Masonic Lodge member and event organizer Phil Moody said the CHIP program can give officers a critical edge when time is short and information sparse. "It could take an hour and a half up to six hours to get this information together and into the system ," he said. "This takes 60 seconds." The program is meant to be compatible with the Amber Alert system, which blasts airwaves and transportation routes with information on missing or abducted children and has been used to recover more than 200 kids nationwide. Moody said the system is often a deterrent to pedophiles and kidnappers. Active alert services like CHIPs and the Amber Alert raise the probability of recovering abducted children "astronomically," from around 13 percent to 97.5 percent, said Moody. To date, the program hasn't been used in Missouri to find a child, and that's fine with Moody. "I hope we can look back in 15 years and say it was never used," he said. That, however, is unlikey. As of 1999, an estimated 797,500 children were reported missing. A sheriff's deputy in Illinois in the ’70s, Moody has seen what happens when fail safes like these don't work and police officers are left scrambling with too little information too late to find a missing child. Once, he had to tell a family that he had found their runaway son. But he needed them to come identify the body. The boy had been killed by a pedophile. "I don't ever want to be on the other side of that," said Moody. The Child Identification Program was created at a national Masonic Lodge meeting in Washington, D.C. in February of 2004, and Moody heard of it at a Missouri Grand Lodge meeting. The program has been active for less than a year, but already it’s been bombarded with more requests to set up ID clinics than it can handle. David Ramsey, a Masonic Lodge member and board member for the Missouri Masonic Children's Foundation, said a crew of Masons are out conducting these events about 50 weekends a year. "We've got every weekend booked from now until November," he said. "It's grown in popularity very, very quickly. We're running out of bodies to do it." Centralia hosted a clinic last month, and Hallsville will have one in October. This is the first time the program has been in Mexico and Moody hopes to see more than 600 kids get ID packets. Any civic organization, not just Masonic Lodges, can bring the CHIP program to their town. For more information visit the Web site www.mochip.org. http://www.mexicoledger.com/articles/2006/04/20/news/news02.txt