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William Brown: Amber Alert Issued For 11-Month-Old Baby Abducted In San Francisco

By Rahul Srinivas
Published on: 08:05 PST, Sep 1, 2016

The California Highway Patrol, on behalf of the District Attorney’s Office of San Francisco, has issued an Amber Alert after an 11-month-old baby from San Francisco. The toddler, identified as William Brown, was reportedly abducted by a suspect identified as 44-year-old Phoebe Haynes.

According to the Amber Alert website, William Brown has been described as an 11-month-old black male, unknown height, unknown weight, with brown hair and brown eyes. The baby was last seen wearing a gray sweatshirt and gray pajamas with sharks on them. The website also mentions that the Amber Alert is in effect for the following counties: San Francisco, San Mateo, Marin, Contra Costa, Solano, Santa Clara, and Alameda.

William Brown was allegedly abducted by the suspect on the night of August 31, 2016, at around 8 p.m., local time from San Francisco. The suspect has been described as a 44-year-old black female, around five feet tall and weighing 180 pounds. She is also described as having black hair and brown eyes, and she was last seen wearing a black colored jacket, a skirt, and boots. The suspect was also reported to be traveling inside a 2004 model Honda Acura with a black bumper. The license plate number, however, is not known.

Initial reports are that the suspect is the child’s own grandmother. The circumstances that led to the abduction of the baby by his own grandmother remain unclear at this point. Police officers maintain that their current priority is to locate the duo and bring the child back to safety, and efforts are on to trace the duo. While the pictures of the two have not been published on the Amber Alert website, local media outlets have published images of the duo. We have embedded a few tweets below.

In case you have seen the woman in the picture with a baby, you should call 911 without any further delay.

Meanwhile, there was outrage by people on social media after a notification alert for the Amber Alert did not give any information about the victim or suspect. The alert message, which has been included below, only informed people about the Amber Alert and asked them to “check local media outlets” for more information. We have embedded a tweet complaining about the same below.

Then, there were others who were annoyed at the fact that a news article talking about an Amber Update on a popular news website was behind a paywall.

This latest Amber Alert issuance came just a few hours after another Amber Alert issued in Kansas ended after the child in question was safely located.

For our non-American readers, an Amber Alert is a child abduction alert system that has its origins from the mid-90s. Officially, it is an acronym for America’s Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response, however, it was named for Amber Hagerman, a 9-year-old who was abducted and murdered in Arlington, Texas, in 1996.

Amber Alerts in the United States are often spread via radio stations, television stations, and cable TV by the Emergency Alert System. Even the NOAA Weather Radio alerts people about Amber Alerts. More recently, the internet and mobile telephones have also played a prime role in finding children for whom Amber Alerts were issued.

[Image via San Francisco Police Department]

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