False Alarm for Amber Alert

An Amber Alert issued Monday in South Jersey was quickly canceled when police discovered that it was all a hoax.

However, police said that the false alarm did prove that the Amber Alert system does work.

Police were called to a Mobil station on Route 130 near Pennsauken, N.J., for the abduction of a 2-year-old girl. Within minutes the alert went out.

But in a bizarre twist, it turned out that there was no 2-year-old girl and there was no abduction.

Police swarmed the parking lot after a woman flagged down an officer, stating that a man who was driving a red van had kidnapped her 2-year-old sister.

Officers got the surveillance video and pulled a picture of the red van and a partial plate. That information was sent out to the media. But then the "woman's" story started to unravel.

"We actually took the victim back to his residence in Philadelphia in the general neighborhood. At that point, the story started to fall apart," said Chief John Coffee of the Pennsauken police.

Pennsauken police said that the "woman" turned out to be a man and he admitted it was all a hoax.

The suspect, David Williams, who goes by several aliases, said that the driver of that van solicited him for prostitution.

Coffee was satisfied, however, that the false alarm proved the efficiency of the Amber Alert system.

"Within a minute, we had notified all the bridges about the Amber Alert system. Everybody through the state police emergency network was notified. So everything went into place, but unfortunately, or fortunately in this case, there really was not an abduction," Coffee said.

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