Found: a Home for Center

The dignitaries assembled in Tustin on Monday to cut the yellow ribbon on the California branch of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children seemed unsure whether to adopt joyous or somber tones for the occasion. But John Walsh, the star of “America’s Most Wanted” and the father who put the plight of missing children in the forefront of the nation’s conscience, was beaming.

“Today is a celebration,” he told more than 50 people gathered outside the center’s new building on Irvine Boulevard. “That was our intention 15 years ago, that our son would not have died in vain.”

Walsh and other missing-children activists recalled meeting in garages and moving from rented hovels to leased buildings ever since the early 1980s, when Walsh’s own 6-year-old son, Adam, was abducted from a Florida shopping mall.

The boy’s decapitated head was later discovered, and Walsh and his wife, Reve, lobbied Congress until they received funding for a national center that would act as a clearinghouse of information. The Walshes also founded the first Adam Walsh Center in Florida in 1982, with the two agencies merging several years ago.

Since then, 983,000 callers have lit up the group’s hotlines and 33,000 abducted children have been recovered, according to the center. The Tustin operation will serve all states west of the Mississippi. The group has offices in Virginia, Florida, South Carolina and New York.

Walsh and his wife were not the only parents of a murdered child at the opening. Diane and Ernesto Medina, who just last month buried their son Anthony Martinez in Beaumont, were blinking back tears after the ceremony. “They came out the next day and started helping us,” Ernesto Medina said. “They helped us do it all. We’d be lost without them.”