SALT LAKE CITY — When they send out Amber Alerts, police recruit the public to be their eyes and ears.
Often it goes according to plan, with someone spotting the child and speaking up. But in a recent case in Salt Lake City, there was an alert but no actual abduction.
It happened in March when a mother didn’t drop off her two-year-old son to other family members as planned. They got concerned for the boy’s safety, a police report states, and told Salt Lake City officers she didn’t have custody of the child.
That wasn’t true, but Salt Lake City officers didn’t know it at the time. They also weren’t aware that a court order those family members showed was outdated — until a case manager saw the alert, set the record straight and gave them a copy of a new agreement.
Turns out, as they wrote in their report, the mother had “every right to have custody of her son.”
Nearly three hours after it was sent, the alert was cancelled.
What police didn’t find in hours of investigation that night, KSL uncovered in minutes: a court record referencing a more recent custody agreement.
So, how come KSL had easy access to public court records that law enforcement didn’t?
A still image from a Salt Lake City police officer’s body camera on March 14, 2025. ( Salt Lake City Police Department)
“It’s a question that we’ve asked ourselves, so as part of our ‘after action’ with this, we went back and looked to see how can we improve,” said Brent Weisberg, then-spokesperson for the Salt Lake City Police Department.
When the KSL Investigators first started asking questions about the case in March, Weisberg said detectives had access to a searchable online state database of court records, but patrol officers working the late shift that night did not.
Four months later, that hasn’t changed. The department told KSL this week it is, “still exploring the option of expanding training and access to Xchange for all patrol officers.”
This case prompted us to look at the Amber Alert system more broadly.
Across the country, 189 Amber alerts went out in 2024, according to the U.S. Department of Justice and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Forty-seven kids were found as a direct result. Five cases were determined to be hoaxes; 27 unfounded.
Utah doesn’t send a lot of alerts, sometimes just one a year. According to the state’s Department of Public Safety, we hit a high of eight in 2021. In total, out of 77 alerts since the program started in our state in 2002, the department told KSL just two were unfounded.
“We want to make sure that if the public’s being called upon to help, it’s valid,” said Mandy Biesinger with the Bureau of Criminal Identification.
That’s why the bureau trains police on the criteria for Amber Alerts: an abduction of a minor who’s in danger of serious injury or death, along with enough details to help the public quickly identify suspects and the missing children.
“Statistics show the sooner a child is recovered, the more likely they are alive,” Biesinger said.
She and her colleagues don’t train officers on investigative work like using court records. That’s up to individual police departments. But in the weeks after an Amber Alert goes out, they do sit down with the police department behind it.
“So we’re kind of checking for like, ‘did this go well? And then there’s even like, ‘what did we learn,’” Biesinger said.
Those meetings aren’t public. And the state doesn’t penalize police for missing steps. The department can cut off a law enforcement agency from triggering alerts, but only if it misused the system on purpose. That means when departments make mistakes, they tend to answer to themselves.
In Salt Lake City, Weisberg said the police department stands behind its response to the report of a missing child in March, while also looking at ways to improve.
“We have to make sure that we are doing everything we can to make sure that we are moving as quickly and effectively as possible for the safety of these children,” Weisberg said.
For officers in Riverdale, moving quickly was key in March as investigators found a woman dead in her home, her two kids and their father missing. They sent an Amber Alert and within hours, got a tip the father was in a canyon near Springville.
“That played a huge role in bringing those kids home safely,” said Riverdale Police Chief Casey Warren.
The father, Ricardo Trujillo Rojel, is now charged with aggravated murder, arson and obstructing justice.
Warren said officers working to be as efficient as they can sometimes make mistakes, but he’s asking Utahns to pay attention to Amber Alerts.
“Even if you’re not quite sure and you think ‘hey, that might be the car,’ but you can’t quite say for sure, say something,” Warren said. “Because your tip could be the difference in saving the children’s life.”
Have you experienced something you think just isn’t right? The KSL Investigators want to help. Submit your tip at investigates@ksl.com or 385-707-6153 so we can get working for you.
