DeKalb County Sheriff Roger Scott said the memory of 7-year-old Melissa Ackerman’s disappearance is still clear 20 years after it happened.

“It was a Sunday afternoon,” Scott said. “I remember it very well.”

Ackerman had been playing with a friend on the south side of Somonauk when they were abducted by Brian Dugan, who later would confess to several other rapes and murders.

The friend managed to escape. Ackerman’s body was found weeks later in LaSalle County.

Dugan was charged with her rape and murder and currently is serving a life sentence.

“It was a very sad case, hard on everybody,” Scott said.

In the years since the murder, DeKalb has been been spared from similar tragedies, but the problem of missing and runaway children continues nationwide.

According to a 2002 study by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 797,500 cases of missing children were reported and nearly 1.7 million cases of runaway or throwaway children were documented in 1999, most of them between the ages of 15 and 17.

Reports of runaway children are acted on immediately, Scott said. After police are notified by a parent or guardian that a child has gone missing, they take a report and immediately release the information to local dispatchers and law enforcement agencies, he said.

Procedures are the same for chronic runaways but may not always call for full-scale searches, Scott said.

Tracking runaways is usually easier in DeKalb County than in the city, Scott said.

While runaways in city areas may have more options when it comes to traveling, those in DeKalb County are often found hanging around with friends or other acquaintances, Scott said.

“Parents usually tell [police] who they’ve been with, what car they’ve been in,” Scott said.

If the runaway is located and doesn’t wish to return home, he or she can be taken into limited custody by police until the appropriate social service agencies can be contacted, Scott said.

Runaways almost always come back, DeKalb Police Lt. Jim Kayes said.

The OJDPP study found that 99 percent of runaways/throwaways eventually return.

Most of them fall into the 16-year-old age group, where they’re old enough to drive cars but still not able to live away from home, Kayes said.

However, younger children are more vulnerable and call for more urgent searches, Kayes said.

“If you’ve got a kid that’s say, 7 or 9, we’re going to look for them,” Kayes said. “They might get picked up by some weirdo or God knows what.”

Kayes said the most serious searches are for children that disappear without warning, usually on the way home from school.

There were 53 reports of kidnapping in 2003, according to DeKalb police’s annual report, which include cases where someone was unlawfully restrained or unlawful visitation interference was involved.

Actual abductions by strangers haven’t occurred in years, said Kayes, who referred to the Ackerman case as one of the most recent examples.

A nationwide program was recently put into place to help recover children reported missing.

The AMBER (Americans Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response) Alert broadcasts reports of child abductions through mediums such as radio, television and emergency broadcast systems.

It was named in memory of Amber Hagerman, a 9-year-old from Arlington, Texas, who was abducted and murdered in 1996. The program began in Arlington and went nationwide in 2003.