At a press conference on Tuesday, Commissioner of Police Clayton Fernander revealed that police sent out a Marco’s Alert for missing teen Devin Issacs, 16, though the alert system was geared toward younger children.
Activist and President of RISE Bahamas, Terneille Burrows gave ZNS News her reaction to the Commissioner’s statement on Wednesday. She said, “the assertion that the Marco’s Alert is only for young children is not accurate based on the law. A child by Bahamian law is defined as anyone under the age of eighteen. There have been only a few marco alerts that have ever gone out and one of them is recent years was for a seventeen year old girl that went missing.”
The Mandatory Action Rescuing Children Operation (MARCO) Alert system was officially launched in 2018. The system is named for Marco Archer who went missing on September 23rd, 2011. He was found dead in bushes on Yorkshire Street five days later. At the time of his death Archer was a sixth grade student at Columbus Primary School.
