The content of Dark Areas includes topics and subject matter that may not be suitable for all audiences. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the individuals participating in the podcast and do not represent those of AudioChuck or its employees. Information discussed by the host and interviewees includes content related to crimes against children, abuse, acts of terrorism, and violence. Listener discretion is advised. Children, they are innocent and the most vulnerable among us. They should be kept close and cared for and watched over. They're not able to see for themselves the darkness that looms in the real world, darkness in the forms of sexual predators, abductors, and murderers. These kinds of people are like a dark fog that can surround children in the blink of an eye and… When that fog lifts, they've vanished with it. Sometimes missing kids leaving an empty swing set, a vacant school bus stop, or a single piece of clothing in their wake. It's those clues that cause a deep sense of disturbance to envelop entire communities, freezing the very fabric of time for the families these children belong to. Search parties, paper flyers, and volunteer groups trudging over leaves and land often help to find more clues.

But sometimes it takes living in darkness to understand darkness, how to navigate it, and how to make it give up what it takes from us. Members of the Federal Bureau of investigations child abduction rapid deployment team do this. In today's episode of Dark Areas, we're going inside the lives of agents who investigate the abduction of children and their attempts to bring them home, dead or alive.. As I steered outside of the window of the security outpost at the FBI's Charlotte, North Carolina Field Office, I saw lines of water were streaking next to one another on the glass. It had started pouring earlier that morning, and the bad weather wasn't forecast to let up for the rest of the day. I watched several of the parallel lines of water form row by row on the thick, bulletproof glass. They each had their separate starting points and paths. Some shot over and spread far away from the others. A few merged with larger drops. But in the end, the water was all going the same direction, down. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw movement, so I turned and watched an older man wearing an FBI badge rifleed through my backpack on the table.

It was a little bit awkward, but I just patiently sat there and waited in one of only two chairs in this small cramped building. He tried to make conversation with me about who I was there to interview, but I could tell that the chitchat just didn't really come natural to him. He took my driver's license, went behind a glass wall. I saw him make a phone call, and then a few minutes later, he returned and handed it back to me. It was official. I was verified and cleared to enter. By the time I passed through the metal detector and powered off my cell phone, which was required, the FBI's media contact arrived to escort me into the large office building, which was behind the security outpost that I was in. As we drove by, the main building definitely had that US government building vibe, towering tall, covered in black glass, and on one side, it had a gaping mouth to an underground concrete parking deck. The media liaison led me through several winding hallways in this big FBI building, and every few minutes I saw her scan her key card at some digital locks. We eventually ended up in a large conference room with FBI Special Agent, Jim Granosio.

The first thing I noticed is that Jim is tall and he just has this general look of a young father, which turns out he is. Jim is a retired cop turned FBI agent, and he's a team leader for the FBI's Child Abduction Rapid Deployment team, also known as CARD.

Yeah, so the CARD team is a specialized team that the FBI created back in 2005, 2006. And it was in response to some activity that was done by our Behavioral Analysis Unit. They realized at the time that responding to a missing child is really different than any other investigative technique that law enforcement does. What's different about missing kids is this. So if local law enforcement is very good at investigating homicides, assaults, domestic violence, larcony, very good at that. But what do you have when you have those investigations? You have usually a crime scene. For a homicide, you'll have a body, witnesses. When you have a missing child, we have no body. Most of the time, we don't have any witnesses. We have no evidence and no crime scene. All we have is that a child is not located where they're supposed to be. That makes it very, very difficult. You're almost starting from a different perspective.

Card team members help local law enforcement agencies work missing children's cases. As of 2020, CARD has roughly 70 agents and analysts in the United States specifically assigned to four different regional teams. Jim leads the East Coast card team. So if a local police department requests the FBI's assistance in a missing child case in his region, Jim has to be ready 24-7 to deploy to wherever that child has vanished from.

We set up shop and we really build a structure for them around the chaos that is ensuing. After 24 hours or 36 hours in one of these, you can really see media comes in. A lot of attention is focused on these things, and a lot of people come in, a lot of volunteers, a lot of local law enforcement, and it's really chaotic. We build that infrastructure. We set command post. We give them guidance on based on statistics and analysis and our experience, here's where you need to put your limited resources to give us the best opportunity to find this child and.

Bring them home. Jim says when a report of a missing or abducted kid comes into a smaller agency, it often has a shell-shocking effect on police departments or small sheriff's offices. Because these types of investigations aren't really normal for those agencies, there is a higher potential for information to get lost or for an investigation to get behind simply because staff in a town or city is overwhelmed. If you go in a.

Typical law enforcement, the average law enforcement agency is what, 30-something average officers. I talk to them and I say, How many have ever worked a true stranger abduction in here? One, two. They don't have the experience. So when it comes down to it, they're dealing with a critical situation, an in-progress situation, and they don't have any experience doing it.

Local and state agencies also don't really know like the FBI does, the dire statistics they're up against from the moment a missing child report comes in.

Time is of the critical essence. So when a child goes missing, is ultimately killed. 50% are dead within the first hour, 75 are dead within the first three hours, and 89% are dead within 24 hours. When you think about that, you don't have much time to say, Let's wait, or, Let's talk to some neighbors and figure out what happens, or it's 11:00 at night. Let's meet again in the morning. Unfortunately, if you're wrong, if that child does not come back, we are statistically already behind the eight ball.

There's also another hurdle that the FBI says law enforcement and really all investigators on a missing child case have to overcome. That's rushing to judgment and quickly labeling a missing child or teenager as a runaway. It's a battle we fight at any teenager that goes missing.

It's human nature, I think. It's not just the public, it's law enforcement. When they think about it, when they start talking to their friends and they say, Oh, they've run away before. They're having problems at home. They probably just ran away and they'll be back tomorrow. And so it's human nature to say, Okay, let's figure out what's going on in the family, but we'll give them time to come home. And unfortunately, like I said, we don't know that for sure. Every police department has responded to many, many missing kids, and most of the time, 90 % of the time, those are what the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children say are runaways. The problem with that is, yes, 90 % are runaways, and maybe many of those will come back within 24 hours. But the question I have for law enforcement, when we go in and we teach law enforcement is, how.

Do you know? The answer, of course, is you don't. Jim says at the onset of a missing child investigation, there's usually so little information to go on that if you put a runaway label on a case too soon and don't investigate other clues or theories, you could squelch any life a case may have of being solved, if in fact, it isn't a runaway situation. That was the exact problem Jim came across when he was deployed to a report of a missing girl in 2014.

Years ago, I worked a missing child by the name of Danielle Lockley here in North Carolina, and she was 15. And a lot of people thought she ran away. And actually what turned the tide on that public perception, including school and friends, was this. One of her friends was over at the house and was talking with the family. And what had happened was someone saw her walking out to her mailbox and then she was all of a sudden gone. There was problems in the family or allegations of problems in the family. And so they said, Okay, she just ran away. And the friend said this, she said her makeup is here. She would not walk out to the mailbox without makeup on, let alone worn away for a long period of time. There's no way this girl would do that. And I really think everyone said, Yeah, you're right. This is an indicator that something's not right. She wouldn't just walk away from something that she always did. So it's little things like that that show that changed perception and say it could be a runaway, but what if it's not?

What was the outcome of Danielle's case?

She was murdered. She was murdered by her boyfriend.

Jameyel Molloy has been indicted on a first-degree murder charge in the 2014 death of 15-year-old Danielle Locklear.

He lured her out of the apartment that night with another boy, and he murdered her, put her body with a cinder block and put her in the river. And we found her in the river.

Weeks later. In the last hours, human remains have been found. Is it missing girl, Danielle Lockclear?

Tragic. Terrible. 15, right? Yeah, she's 15.

Based on experiences like the Locklear case, Jim is a firm believer that misdiagnosing any minor's disappearance as simply a runaway scenario can be a grave mistake. He understands, though, why some investigators and agencies are so quick to jump to this conclusion. He says because young people's use of technology in their cell phones is so much greater than it was even a decade ago, online activity can blur the line for police who are asking, Was this child or teenager really taken? Or did they choose to run away to be with someone? Kids these.

Days with the devices, you have a lot of grooming, right? If kids are meeting people online, they think it's a boy from the next town over, and they fall in love via text or instant message, kick, whatever may be, and they're talking with them, and it comes a time when they're going to meet, and that person says, I'm going to come pick you up. Leave your phone at home or do whatever with it. Well, yeah, that girl or boy walked out of their house on their own record, and technically they ran away. They packed their bag, they grabbed their toothbrush, and they left. But where are they now and who are they with? So, yes, they ran away. But what happens when we exploit that social media? We found out that 15-year-old boy that she thought she was talking to is actually a 55-year-old guy from 3,000 miles away. Where are they now and what are they doing? And is she really in agreement with everything that's going on?

Probably not. There's no clear rulebook on how or when to label a case a runaway, at least not within the first 24 hours of a child going missing. So instead, Jim and his team investigate a case just like the lines of raindrops that I saw trickling down the window outside of the security outpost. The agents put information side by side, knowing full well that some leads may shoot off on their own and go nowhere. Some may merge with others. But all of the work, like the water, is going in the same direction, narrowing down a mystery by a process of elimination. Things are going to happen in that neighborhood.

Either a bad guy lives in that neighborhood, there's witnesses in that neighborhood, if this child had been murdered, the child is going to be put in a certain vicinity of that neighborhood. I need to get in that neighborhood and literally tear it apart.

From the moment someone reports a child missing, investigators looking into that case have questions to ask everyone. I want to exploit and.

Understand that household. I want to know what's going on in that household. Is there domestic violence? Are there children in there? Are they bringing neighbors in, people transient, people in and out of there? That all plays into the victimology of it. I want to fully understand that. There are red herrings everywhere. Of course, there's a creepy neighbor guy, always. There is the child likes to go play over with this kid who may have hit him before. There's always parents. And who has a perfect family? I don't know, I don't. But when you look at the family and the dynamics of that family, you're going to see problems. You see problems in every family. But we need to peel that back and say, okay, are these problems that would cause hurt to that child or push that child into running away? There's not an easy answer, but yeah, there's always red herrings. There's neighbors that we need to investigate. There's a suspicious vehicle that everybody sees, that white van, right? The white creepy van, that free candy on the side of it or whatever. And there's always people that are going to say that, right? There's call and complaints saying we saw them at Walmart.

There's call and complaints from down the road saying we saw that kid 300 miles away and we can't discard those. Specifically, they're probably not reasonable, but we are going to follow up on those. What is.

The most significant element in a case as soon as you guys get there? It's different based on the facts and the age.

Of the kid, the sex of the kid, the neighborhood that they're in, the circumstances of how they went missing, it's different. But I need to get in there and interview every person, every adult, every child. I need to search every building, outhouse, body of water in that neighborhood. I need to empty every body of water in that neighborhood to make sure that that child is not there and then hopefully find some witnesses.

Sometimes the best witnesses Jim probes for answers are the stationary, silent ones.

These days, many houses have cameras, so I need to exploit that. I need to get in there. Ring devices are a wonderful, wonderful thing for us, and we want to exploit that. Video technology is often lost very, very quickly. If you look at, for example, A+ Minimart, a local gas station, that stuff is rolled over every 48 hours oftentimes. We know we need to get there very, very quickly in order to pull that video. It's not as easy as just saying, calling the owners and say, Grab that video for us. We literally, most of the time, have to send tech agents in to assist with them in actually extracting that data. So it takes a lot of resources. We're working with legal process to call Ring to call video cameras for houses that are housing and get that from them.

When he's talking with actual people who saw or heard things, he has to be strategic while he's interviewing them. He tries to work around witnesses, assumptions, and biases.

Stranger abductions are very rare. When someone thinks of a stranger abduction, they always say, Oh, sex offender. Let's go after the sex offenders. Statistically, it being a sex offender is about eight % stranger abduction. So while I'm going to certainly target sex offenders in that neighborhood, in that area, and I'm going to talk to them, it's not a priority. I'm going to do it. But statistically speaking, it's probably not one of them that actually took the child. So our question to the neighbor across the street is, Hey, did you see anything yesterday? We're looking for a little whoever. Did you see anything yesterday? Did you see anything unusual yesterday? And law enforcement might normally go in there and do that. My question is, What did you see yesterday? Was there a UPS truck here? Was there an Amazon truck here? Great. Potential witnesses, potential subspects, but also video cameras on those things.

Any images of the missing child or the comings and goings of the area that they disappeared from helped Jim and Card team members tremendously. Such was the case in 2018, when Jim was called again to North Carolina to help find a missing 13-year-old girl. Her name was Hanya Aguilar.

Thirteen-year-old girl, she's at her home. She's getting ready to go to school at 5:30 in the morning. It's raining out, so the relatives let her move the car that's at the end of driveway up to the front of the driveway so that the parents can take her to school and her sister. She gets in the car, she drives it up. She gets out of the car and a stranger puts her back in the car and abducts her.

Today, investigators searched parts of Lumberton, hoping to get closer to finding Anya Aguilar. The 13-year-old was kidnapped outside her home Monday morning.

For us, it was difficult. There was a lot of people, hundreds of law enforcement officers on that for several several days. We had lots of video. We were tracking the bad guy. We were trying to find him very, very quickly.

The FBI released new surveillance video of the stolen SUV taken within minutes after the alleged kidnapping. Investigators are now calling on.

The public to help in the manhunt. We found his car, he hit us later. He ran from us. We got him, but it was too late. And it was just devastating to know that this poor girl was getting ready to go to school on a normal day, happy-go-lucky. And literally, it was just ripped from her by an offender that had sexual tendencies and had been arrested in the past. And unfortunately, we just didn't get their time.

Hanya Aguilar's killer, like Jim said, was caught and imprisoned, which is a good thing. Having that video from the community helped provide her family with some answers and closure as to what happened to Hanya, how she was taken, when and where her body ultimately ended up. Jim says even though the surveillance video in that case couldn't help the FBI save Hanya in time, it still served a great purpose for the investigation as a whole. He says the same goes for public engagement on social media with missing kids reports. They're essential to alerting people that a child has been taken and all eyes need to be open.

Social media changed things because not only am I now not relying on the local news to broadcast it, but literally, families and victim families are almost immediately on Facebook, and they're spreading that message to their friends. They are then posting it. Within 10 minutes, you have 5,000 people reposting that a child is missing, and the law enforcement hasn't even arrived on scene yet. I think that's really changed things.

But as we all know, social media can be a double edged sword in a world where anyone can write anything online and it's believed as truth, sometimes post by concerned citizens in a missing child investigation can become hindrances to the FBI instead of help.

People who are just spreading false information hurts us and ultimately takes resources away from the legitimate investigation and gives us a worse opportunity to find this.

Child alive. That exact fear came true during the Hanya Aguilar investigation.

We were very, very quickly in the social media, very quickly asking for help from the community because we had a vehicle that we knew. We were putting that out very, very quickly asking for help. But people literally made up things like they had seen her at certain areas and then started pushing that very heavily in social media. If I'm a neighbor and I say I saw her at a gas station, I'm convinced of it. She asked me for $5 and it was two hours away from here, there's no doubt. Then all of her friends liked that social media post and all of their friends and the whole neighborhood saying she was seen here, she was seen here. Well, of course the FBI is going to follow up on that. But ultimately, when we went and talked to that girl, she made up their whole story. Think about the time it took us to find out who that was, find out where they live, sent officers and agents to that person's house to figure out that wasn't real and then get that word out to people saying, Hey, this allegation is not legitimate. Please don't consider it.

Please don't keep reposting it. And then we can move on to the legitimate activity.

So to be clear, the FBI wants people to keep sharing posts about missing kids. They want people to write in with tips and information. But please use common sense when it comes to what you post about online regarding a missing child. Don't hype up fear and spread misinformation. No one should be the person who boggs down a federal investigation into a missing child because they wanted to get attention. Another downside to social media engagement, according to Jim, is that social profiles and chat rooms are the precise tools many of these child abductors use to access and lure young kids and teens. We're back to that double-edged sword thing that I was talking about.

I certainly think that phones and social media and computers are game changers. It's the window to the soul of the devil, if you will, when it comes to missing kids. They are both good and bad. They're a great way to find people. But I also know that that's the open door into your house. People are worried about the bogeyman and someone breaking in. I'm going to lock my doors at night. But yet they give their child that telephone and the child goes up to the room and is on that phone all night long. That literally is the open window into your house in order to get that child out. If I'm a bad guy, I don't need to break into your house. I'm going to groom your child. I'm going to lure that child. The child's going to come to me. Why would I break into your house? I don't need to do that.

That's a sobering thought for sure. It makes me want to never let any kid I'll ever have have a phone or access to the Internet. When you.

Look at someone who's going to groom a child and then lure them out online, they're socially marginal, right? They don't have the ability to go up and interact with that child. They're not going to take them, but they can do that online. They can spend the time grooming that child where maybe that child's mom and dad don't pay attention to them and don't listen to them. Well, that individual will spend the time listening to them, talking to them and say, Your parents are this, your parents are that, all in an attempt to get them out of the house in order to have a relationship. Certainly, these people probably are not in it for long-term relationships. They didn't just meet at the 13-year-old girl online and think that they're going to be their life partner. It's mostly sexual gratification and determination that they're going to get out of this. Then when they realize what they've done, that's where the danger comes in for these kids. The offender is so motivated to get their hands on these children. Once it happens, Okay, I get my hands on these children. I've done the act, whatever I need to do.

Oh, my gosh, what do I do now? I have a child that I can't bring home. Because where am I going to explain this? It's now a witness.

If a child does make it out of that situation alive, more than likely, Jim says the psychological damage a perpetrator has inflicted on them via the online or in-person relationship is severe. The child just doesn't always know it.

The grooming effect really takes hold of these kids, and even afterwards, puts hold on them. I'll give you an example. I worked a missing girl. She was 12 years ago in New Jersey, and she was lured out of her house. The bad guy paid for her to get on a bus and drive about 200 miles down to him. We literally caught up with them as she was getting off the bus, and we pulled him over. In his backpack, he had a knife, he had a little teddy bear, he had handcuffs, he had all the duct tape. He was going to do bad things to this child. We recovered her. It was great. Nothing bad happened to her. That gentleman actually wanted to go to trial. We were preparing for trial, and I remember bringing her into the FBI office, and we were talking to her. She was going to testify. She was a great witness, smart, and was ready to go. She goes, Mr. Jim, can I ask you a question? I said, Sure. After the trial is done, can I go home with my family? I said, Absolutely, of course. She said, Can I ask you another question?

I said, Sure. And she said, Is he going to go to jail? I said, Probably. She goes, All right, one last question. I said, Sure. She said, When he's done with jail, can I still marry him? And so she really didn't understand. I mean, he was totally locked into her, and she was still ready to... She was still in love with this guy in his graft and ready to wait for him to get out of jail at 12 years old. Just a scary thought for parents.

It's honestly heart-wrenching for me to think that a child has been so deceived and prey upon that they don't even know the difference between real love and evil. To me, that's the epitome of disturbing, but probably worse than a stranger on the internet, praying on and ultimately killing a child, is someone within that child's own family being the one who takes them or orchestrates their demise, someone who was supposed to take care of them. That is crippling to me. I've covered cases that ended that way so many times in my career as a journalist. Jim can say the same thing, sadly. In our interview, I asked him how the card team investigates familial abductions. At what point do FBI agents clear family members? Or do family members always stay on the FBI's radar? His answer will make anyone who hates confrontation squirm. This afternoon, authorities released the autopsy results for a three-year-old Mariah Woods. A dive team recovered the toddler's body at a Pender County Creek in December. Her family reported her missing days earlier. In November 2017, FBI Special Agent Jim Garnosio and his card team were dealt a heartbreaking defeat. The body of a missing toddler, Mariah Woods, was found lifeless in a North Carolina creek.

She'd been wrapped in garbage bags and sunken in a sofa cushion that was filled with cement. Jim wasn't able to bring Mariah home alive despite weeks of intense searching. When I.

Got home from that, you're just exhausted because generally you go into these and we worked... Generally the first 48 hours, there's no sleep for our whole team. Then we would work on shifts of three or four hours of rest of sleep. We were just exhausted, everybody was. I got home, I walked in, and I got some breakfast and it was in the morning. I remember I just had tears pouring down my face, and my wife walks out. She's also an agent. I'm not really that emotional normally, but I couldn't stop crying like a little kid.

Mariah was the same age as Jim's own child. She had the.

Same little car that my kid had. When you see things like that, it's hurtful. You go back and you hug your kids.

Jim and law enforcement in North Carolina, who were working tirelessly to find Mariah's killer, were chasing hundreds of tips and leads, but something kept them coming back to the original 911 caller who had reported Mariah missing. Let's tell me exactly what happened.

I've seen her. There's no where to be found. We would look everywhere at our house. In our yard, and our little girl, she's missing.

Okay. How old is she, sir? She's three years old. Okay, so let me get some information from you, okay?

Yes, ma'am. All right.

So when is the last time you seen her? I went to bed last night.

Every once in a while, we went to bed at the same time. And what time is that, sir? I had a baby at eight o'clock, 8:30. She had pajamas. Okay.

And what piece of.

Day did.

You put her.

In, sir? What color did you put her in?

They were pink. Okay. And her name?

Her name is Mariah.

Mariah?

Wood.

That male voice on the panicked 911 call was Mariah's mother's living boyfriend, 32-year-old, Earl Kimrie. Early on in the search for Mariah, Earl was someone who'd been closely involved in the investigation. I mean, after all, he had dialed 911 to report her missing. A few months after Mariah vanished, authorities in North Carolina ended up arresting and charging Earl with the three-year-old's murder. Law enforcement determined that Earl was watching Mariah the night she disappeared and her mother was at work. Authorities from day one knew that Mariah had muscular dystrophy and couldn't walk without specialized shoes. Those shoes were found in the home after her disappearance, and that led Jim and investigators to suspect that Mariah would never leave or walk away on her own free will without them. The police's suspicion about Earl really only mounted when he was later accused by other children in the family of sexually abusing Mariah before her death. This sad case of a domestic or often what's called familial abduction, is one that haunts Jim forever.

That was terrible, devastating. I remember being distraught from that for days afterwards because of what happened to her and what happened to that community.

How common are cases where family members are the abductor or are the abductor and killer as well?

Well, you got to look at the age, right? So the age of the child is key. Anyone from age three and under, who has access to that kid? They're generally not around strangers. You're automatically going to look at people who have access to that child. If the child just goes missing, okay, could they have walked away? Sure. Could a stranger abducted them? Sure. Is it possible? Like I said, less than 1% of kids who go missing in this country every year get abducted by a stranger. Statistically, it's an anomaly. Are we going to consider it? Absolutely. But what statistics show us is that probability is that someone in that family has something to do with what's going on here.

Mariah Wood's case specifically and all of the factors involving her living conditions, her health, her mother's relationship, caused Jim to ask the necessary questions targeted at that family.

Does mom have a new boyfriend who doesn't like the kid, thinks he's in the way? Is the child a bother to the family? Do they have special needs? Is there financial something going on in the family where that child is now a burden to them that they need to get rid of? We want to exploit all that, understand that, and then be able to say, Okay, because of that, who had access to it? What is the facts showing us?

Even in cases where investigators truly feel that a family member or parent has nothing to do with a child's disappearance, the FBI will still press them hard. According to Jim, it's better to do this sooner rather than later in an investigation because it's the best and most efficient way to rule someone out so that the investigation can move forward. Confrontation with families happens a lot, and Jim says he understands that parents don't like to be seen as automatic suspects, but it's just part of the job. When families feel like they're being looked at, what hindrances can come into the investigation because of that? And that's just reality of life.

Yeah, certainly it's traumatizing, right? If you have a child that goes missing, it's traumatizing. There's no doubt about it. You're in a state of shock. And because of that, oftentimes people will not necessarily lie to us, but maybe try to hide things. For example, if maybe their house is in disarray and there's a termite on the floor, well, they might think, Wow, the FBI is in here. They're going to call DSS. They'll think I killed the kid because there's a termite on the floor or there's no food in the fridge. They might lie to us to protect that fact. Did they really do anything with the kid? Not necessarily, but they might be not truthful. We have to extract that and understand what they're trying to hide and whatnot. But you also have to look at the public perception of it. Neighbors are talking online. Why was mom inside and not outside with a kid? What was mom doing? Where is dad in that house? What's going on in that house? Why weren't they doing this or that? Or the judgment and the pressure. Why aren't they talking to law enforcement? They got an attorney.

What are they doing? What are they hiding? Why are they doing that? So the public perception, the bringing in of national media to really focus in and trying to understand why are they not talking, why are they talking, is detrimental to us. Lots of times we will bring them with us at one of our press conferences and say, Here's mom. We are team, family team, and we're trying to find the child together. She is on our side. We're working together. She's not doing anything, but trying to help us find the child. We want the public to know that.

Working delicately with families, investing sleepless days and nights to the search for a child, and sometimes seeing the most horrific ending to these crimes, it takes a toll on Jim and all of the card team members.

They each have a lasting effect on everybody who is involved. I call it a tattoo. There's always a tattoo for morning deployments. Some of them are beautiful. Tattoos are sometimes beautiful and awesome to look at. You want to show them off to other people. Other ones remind you of the pain that you went through and may look not good, but they are there every day and you have to look at them. I call them my tattoos that I have.

For you, what is the darkest part of this job?

The darkest part is that the bogeyman exists for me. No matter what I try to do to profile him, get the word out, try to prevent things from happening, that bad people exist and they do bad things to vulnerable people, and in this case, kids. I'm not sure as a society, we can stop it. I think we can understand it better. We can respond to it better. We can prepare for it better. But opportunities arise for people, and they do bad things. That's a scary thought, a scary concept to comprehend and to accept. I'm a parent of a five and seven-year-old. I'm scared to death for them, but I'm not going to live my life overly protecting them. I still need to let them go out and experience the world. I'm cautious. I look over their shoulder, but I also realize that I can't just stop them. So a bogeyman exists, but I still have to let them go out in that world and experience it.

To help Jim cope with all of the darkness that he sees and investigates in the field, the FBI requires card team members visit mental health counselors and that they undergo annual mental health assessments. But even with those requirements in place, Jim says this job can't be a career.

The work is detrimental to our mental health. I think it's a limited shelf life that we have in this team because of that. You can't do it forever. I don't know when my time won't... I've been doing it for six years. I'm not sure if it would be the next time or if I can do it for the next five years, but you can't certainly do it forever.

New crops of FBI agents join the card teams and some leave each year, but every one of them is dedicated to the same mission: finding and bringing home children that are taken while racing against a never ending ticking cloth. The FBI encourages all parents or guardians of minors to download the FBI Child ID app on your smartphone or device. It's a free app that includes tips on keeping children safe, as well as guidance on what to do in those first few critical hours after a child goes missing. You can upload photos of a child, identifying information, and you can even create a missing poster that you can easily send directly to authorities if your child disappears. And if you're worried about privacy, the FBI doesn't collect or store any of the photos or information that you upload to the app. You can download the FBI Child app today on the Apple App Store or Google Play. A link to more information about this app is on our website, darkarenas. Com. This episode of Dark Areinas was written and produced by Delia D. I. Ambra, with writing assistants from executive producer, Ashley Flowers. You can find pictures and all of the source material for this episode on our website, darkarenas.

Com. Dark Arenas is an audio Chuck original show. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?