Iowa Department of Public Safety introduces Child Abduction Response Team

DES MOINES - Iowa has a new action plan that law enforcement officials hope will provide more expedience and efficiency in responding to cases involving abducted children cases.

The plan was designed with the 2012 abduction of two Evansdale children in mind, officials said.

The new Child Abduction Response Team, or CART, which was developed with a $25,000 federal grant, includes a new mobile command center and training for local law enforcement officials across the state.

'We're only there to help as a force multiplier. We're there to bring more people, boots on the ground,” said Mike Motsinger, special agent in charge of the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation. 'The more people you can get there quicker, the chances of recovering that child obviously go up higher.”

In June 2012, 8-year-old Elizabeth Collins and 10-year-old Lyric Cook, both of Evansdale, went missing. Their bodies were discovered almost five months later at a nearby wildlife park.

An investigation conducted by multiple local, state and federal agencies has not discovered the girls' abductor.

Motsinger said the new response team was developed 'in response to the recent and tragic abductions and murders” of Collins and Cook, as well as the 2013 abduction and murder of 15-year-old Kathlynn Shepard of Dayton.

The Iowa Department of Public Safety announced the new program in conjunction with a daylong training session involving more than 120 law enforcement officials from across the state.

The department's goal is to have law enforcement officials trained in each of six regions. Those local officials would be the 'first responders,” Motsinger said. They would decide whether to request assistance from state officials and the mobile command center.

'We have everything we need to establish a command center no matter where we respond in the state of Iowa,” Motsinger said. 'Why we did that is to try to alleviate some of the pressure that we have on the local departments and their dispatch centers.”

The Evansdale Police Department and Black Hawk County Sheriff's office did not respond to messages left Monday by the Lee Enterprises Des Moines Bureau.

Motsinger said the new program was nearly put to use when a child was reported missing recently in suburban Des Moines. The child was found shortly after state officials were called to respond.

'The next call would have been getting the CART team up and running,” Motsinger said. 'That would have probably been one of our first deployments with the true CART team.”