In August of 2020, one-year-old Mateo Montufar-Barrera was lounging in a stroller as his mother walked him around their Chamblee, Georgia neighbourhood. But their calm lunchtime walk was shattered when, at 12:30 p.m., a man pulled up next to them in a car, pulled out a gun, and kidnapped Mateo.
Mateo’s kidnapping activated an AMBER Alert, a federal system designed to notify as many organisations and people as possible about urgent child abductions. All the investigators had to go on was the mother’s eyewitness account of the kidnapper, including a description of the maroon Acura SUV he had driven and a license plate tag number.
