LAS VEGAS, Nev. (FOX5) – As of this report, Las Vegas police say say there are about 200 open cases for missing children in the valley.
FOX5 sat down one-on-one with Metro’s Missing Person Detail to learn what they’re doing to find them.
“The longer people are missing, the more concerning it becomes,” said Missing Persons Detective Sergeant, William Gethoefer.
He breaks down different ways Metro’s Missing Person Detail will respond to reports of a missing child.
He says a child 11 or younger will trigger an immediate call out, or if there are additional factors at play, like some form of diminished mental capacity or a reason to believe they’re endangered.
“We will respond to the residence of the missing juvenile, we will do a full work up of that person, their home, we will interview the parents, the guardian, whoever’s listing that person as missing,” he says.
Gethoefer says detectives will also determine where they go to school, and work with school police to get class rosters.
“We’ll try to find out if they have a cell phone or any tracking devices so we can try to track them that way,” he adds.
If a child is 12 or older, and there is no reason to believe they’re in immediate danger or have any diminished mental capacity, Gethoefer says a normal missing persons report will be filed and routed to their Missing Persons Detail for follow up.
From there, he says he will go through each report to confirm there is no immediate danger, before assigning a detective to that case.
“They will contact the PR, which is the person reporting, and they will just go over it with them,” He says. “Basically, they want to ascertain if there’s any additional information that they have for us.”
He says from there, they’ll work to figure out where the child was last seen.
“We can look for video, we can try to ping a cell phone,” he says.
In both categories, Gethoefer says they’ll automatically make a flyer and send it out through “APB Net,” which is a software used by law enforcement to spread information fast.
He says the flyers will go to places like casinos, hospitals, and the RTC, with the hope of getting it in front of everyone they can.
They will also automatically scan a child’s social media.
“If they’re taking pictures and posting them on social media, we can try to ascertain where that photograph was taken and try to go to where the photograph was taken,” he says.
He says they can also track an IP address to determine where a child is posting from.
This past year, Gethoefer says they had about 7,300 missing persons cases, split between seven detectives.
“Now, if you do the math, that’s over 1000 cases per detective,” he says. “Our workload is extreme. Fortunately, we have a lot of good people.”
As for when they’ll get the media involved, he says they will generally only send out a press release when they are investigating an endangered juvenile or adult with an “elevated sense of urgency.”
“This helps us get wide spread attention and more people aware of our missing person and their endangered status,” he says.
Copyright 2025 KVVU. All rights reserved.
