The Amber Alert continues for a missing Quad Cities girl taken yesterday by her father. The mother of a one-year-old Arisbeth Martinez says the girl was taken from her home on Sunday by 23-year-old Juan Tapia, who’s a Hispanic man around six-foot-three-inches tall with a shaved head and a tattoo on his neck. Public Safety Department spokesman Jim Saunders says it began as a missing-persons case.He says the mother tried searching for the child and her father before going to Davenport police, who contacted the state agency around nine Sunday evening and filed the documentation requesting the Amber Alert. One vital fact they were lacking was the license-plate number of the car the alleged abductor was driving.That detail’s usually a vital one for such a report, but working with police they got a fairly detailed report on the vehicle including some front-end damage it had, so they used that to put out the Amber Alert. Saunders was asked if the Alert will expire if more time goes by and the child is not found.He’d rather say the Alert won’t be reissued unless new information develops, like getting that missing car plate number. It’d be added to the Amber Alert system, but for now all the information available has been announced. It’s on the state website “Iowa Amber Alert-dot-com,” and right now road signs across Iowa are flashing the alert. The D-O-T road signs are programmed to run the information for a 24-hour period, so if there’s no new information to add, like that plate number, they’ll probably stop around 10 tonight (Monday) or 24 hours after the Alert first went out. The search continues for the man considered armed and dangerous and for 1-year-old Arisbeth Tapia Martinez, last seen in a white shirt, tiny blue jeans and pink socks. Authorities said they might be headed to Chicago but don’t know for sure. weblink
