The county’s Missing Persons Unit asks anyone who sees or knows the whereabouts of a missing person to contact investigators directly.
National figures measure different things
National missing-person statistics offer context, but they do not explain Eckert’s case. The FBI’s NCIC counted 93,447 active missing-person records as of December 31, 2024; 25,493, or 27 percent, were for juveniles under 18. That is a snapshot of active records, not a count of children who went missing during the year or a measure of their eventual outcomes.
A separate measure comes from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, which said it assisted law enforcement with 29,568 missing-children cases in 2024 and helped bring 91 percent of those children home. Those are NCMEC-assisted cases and outcomes, not a directly comparable count of FBI active records and not information about Eckert’s recovery.
AMBER Alert criteria are specific
Maryland State Police lists confirmed abduction, a belief that the child is in danger of serious harm or death, and enough information to help locate the child among the criteria for an AMBER Alert. Those general criteria do not establish whether an alert was considered in Eckert’s case. Police have released no additional information about the circumstances of her disappearance or recovery.
