Smarts Give Unsolved Missing Cases Hope

March 14 -- While Elizabeth Smart and her family are enjoying their reunion, many other parents of missing children are waiting to embrace that same miracle — as unlikely as it may be.

Law enforcement officials and child kidnapping experts were amazed Sandy City police in Utah found Elizabeth alive nine months after her abduction. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children reports that most children are killed if they are not found within 48 hours after their abduction.

But the Elizabeth Smart case has been different from other missing children cases from the start. The details of her abduction were stunning — taken at knifepoint from her own bedroom in front of her little sister — and it garnered intense media attention. Most missing children get no notice in the press.

But arguably, police would not have been able to find Elizabeth — and Brian David Mitchell, the homeless street prophet who was wanted for questioning and is now a suspect in her kidnapping — without all the attention the case attracted from the very beginning.

And children who disappeared before Elizabeth, but who are not household names, remain missing with little fanfare. Tionda and Diamond Bradley, ages 10 and 3, have not been seen since July 6, 2001, when their mother went to work, and police have few new leads. The disappearance of 2-year-old Jahi Turner has baffled San Diego police since April 2002. And in Milwaukee, Alexis Patterson has not been seen since she disappeared while on her way to school last May.

And there are countless others. Smart's recovery gives law enforcement and child activists a glimmer of hope that other children will be found and reunited with their families, no matter how long they have been missing.

"I have long said that this case [the disappearance of Tionda and Diamond Bradley] is just a matter of one phone call, somebody remembering something, just like in the Elizabeth Smart case," said Dave Bayless, spokesman for the Chicago Police Department. "It's just a matter of one person seeing something and making that call that will lead us to where these girls are and bring them home safely to their family."