Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong support of this legislation, which, of course, includes the AMBER Alert bill.

Last September, President George Bush took immediate action to help expand and improve the AMBER Alert system; and he provided a total of $10 million from existing funds in order to expand and develop the AMBER training and education programs and in order to upgrade the emergency alert system. I support President Bush's efforts, and I urge Congress to pass this important bill so that we can continue our efforts to ensure that an AMBER Alert system will be there for all of our Nation's children.

As we witnessed, AMBER plans have worked to bring home children safely; and I wanted to share one particular story about a 10-year-old girl from Riverside, California, named Nicole Timmons. We have the system in California, but, luckily, neighboring Nevada also picked up this alert; and on the Nevada radio stations they reported that Nicole had just been kidnapped by an individual and gave a certain amount of information. Luckily, a very alert citizen in Nevada was listening to this broadcast as he was driving next to the vehicle that Nicole was being transported in, being abducted in. He noticed that the driver was behaving rather suspiciously, and he noticed this 10-year-old girl. As a consequence, he immediately notified law enforcement. They moved in, and they rescued Nicole.

What is important here is in 75 percent of the cases where a young child is killed by an abductor, that murder occurs within the first 3 hours. That is why it is necessary that these alerts go up immediately to give other citizens a chance to help apprehend, to help report suspicious behavior, to help look for that abductor.

Of course, we have to ask ourselves, what if Nevada had not picked up the California alert? That is why we want to expand it across the Nation.