Gainesville police find man and child dead during search for missing Oklahoma pair
An investigator found the bodies while searching for a Norman, Oklahoma, father and his 4-year-old child. The medical examiner has not yet identified them.
A Gainesville police investigator found a man and a child dead on Oct. 14 while searching for a father and his 4-year-old child reported missing from Norman, Oklahoma, the department said. The medical examiner has not yet identified the two, and police have not confirmed they are the missing pair.
The department's release called the investigation ongoing and said Texas Rangers were assisting. Police did not announce a cause or manner of death.
According to the release, Gainesville officers documented a suspicious encounter involving a man and a child at a North Grand Avenue business on Oct. 12. An initial search using a drone did not find them. On Oct. 14, an investigator reviewed surveillance footage, searched the surrounding area and found the bodies, police said.
Oklahoma authorities identified the missing pair as Andres “Harry” Furley, 4, and his father, Caleb Furley, 25. Oklahoma's endangered-missing advisory, issued Oct. 13, said the two were last seen in Norman at about 7 p.m. on Oct. 11 and that police received the missing-person report on Oct. 12.
An Oct. 14 notice said the Oklahoma Highway Patrol had activated an AMBER Alert for Norman police. The notice said Caleb Furley failed to appear for an exchange with the child's mother and was subject to a parental-kidnapping warrant.
Oklahoma's Department of Public Safety separates the two kinds of notice. Its advisory covers endangered children 17 and younger who do not meet AMBER criteria. Its AMBER guidelines call for a reasonable belief that an abduction occurred and that the child faces imminent danger of serious injury or death. They also require enough descriptive information to aid a search and entry into the National Crime Information Center database.
The AMBER system has North Texas roots. The Texas Department of Public Safety says Dallas-Fort Worth broadcasters and law enforcement developed it after 9-year-old Amber Hagerman was abducted and killed in Arlington in 1996. Texas set up its statewide program in 2002.
A DPS release on House Bill 3556, effective June 13, 2023, says the law is informally known as the Athena Alert legislation, after the 2022 kidnapping and murder of Athena Strand in Wise County. DPS said it lets a local chief law enforcement officer activate an AMBER Alert before every standard criterion is verified, if the officer considers it warranted. Coverage reaches 100 miles around where the child disappeared or was last seen, plus all adjacent counties, DPS said.
The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children's 2024 AMBER Alert report lists 54 originating alerts in Texas and six in Oklahoma. Those figures count alerts. They are not population-adjusted abduction rates. In the same report, family abductions were the largest category, at 96 of 157 cases after hoaxes and unfounded reports were excluded.
2024 AMBER Alert cases that were family abductions, the largest category
Excludes hoaxes and unfounded reports. The same analysis counted 46 nonfamily abductions.
The center also explains that an originating agency or AMBER plan can ask another plan to extend an alert beyond its own jurisdiction. Six alerts received such extensions in 2024.
_Editor's note: Everyone charged with a crime is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in a court of law._
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