The Adam Walsh Story

It is a parent's worst nightmare...suddenly your child is missing.  It can happen at an amusement park, a clothing store, a department store, or a supermarket.  This is exactly what happened to Reve and John Walsh on July 27, 1981, when their 6-year-old son, Adam, was abducted from a Florida department store.

Adam and his mother went to the store to shop for lamps.  The store was about one mile from their home.  They parked the car where they always did.  Holding hands, they crossed the parking lot to the north entrance, the same as always.  That put them in the toy department.  Right in the middle of the toys was the big attraction:  a television monitor displaying computer video games.  They were brand new back then.  Several children were playing with the game, and Adam asked if he could stay and play also. Reve said okay and told him to stay there until she returned from the lamp department.  The lamps were about 75 feet away -- out of sight, but not very far.  The lamps were out of stock, so Reve left her name and number. She was gone about seven minutes.

Adam was not at the video game.  Reve walked down several aisles calling out Adam's name.  She realized that not only was Adam gone, but all the children were gone and the video was silent.  Reve spotted a boy about Adam's age wearing the same hat as Adam.  She asked the child if he had seen another boy with the same hat.  He nodded yes and pointed to the west door.  Reve was positive that Adam would not go out the west door.  The toy department clerk said she had not seen Adam.  Reve started asking anyone she could find, but they all said the same things.

Oh, well, he probably just wandered off.

I'll bet he went looking for you.

Well you know how kids are, maybe he went off with the rest of the kids.

Reve kept insisting that her son did not wander off, and that something was wrong.  All around, clerks kept waiting on people as if nothing had happened.  She asked a clerk to page her son.  "Adam Walsh, please meet your mother in the toy department." Nothing.  After going to her car twice to see if Adam had gone there and looking for him on her own for two hours, someone finally called the police department.

The police later interviewed a security guard from the store who said that on the day of Adam's disappearance, there had been four boys playing with the video game in the toy department.  They started causing a ruckus.  She separated them and sent two boys out the north entrance and two out the west entrance.  If Adam had been put out the west entrance, he would have been disoriented because he only knew the north entrance.

By the end of the first week, 150,000 fliers had been printed and 50,000 of them distributed locally.  Adam's photograph was on the poster.  The photograph chosen had just been taken the week before and showed a missing tooth.

Sixteen days after Adam Walsh disappeared from that local department store, his body was positively identified through dental records and by a friend of the family.  To date, no one has been indicted for the abduction and death of Adam Walsh.
 

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, approximately 4,600 children are abducted annually by non-family members.  You can help reduce this number by encouraging your local retailers to adopt the Code Adam program.

We will never know whether or not Adam would have survived on that July morning in 1981 if a program like Code Adam had been in place, but this program has the potential to save many children like Adam.  Since its development and implementation six years ago, Code Adam has successfully thwarted a number of abductions in progress.