It is always nice when these stories have a happy ending. I know that death is usually not a happy ending but if you are someone that is kidnapping children, you deserve to die. It appears as though even the kidnapper knew this because he died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound while fleeing police.
src
Savannah Childress disappeared on February 11th from her town in North Carolina (the state I live in) and this resulted in an Amber alert and a massive coordinated search on the part of both civilians and police.
Her abductor, 38-year-old William Robert Ice, apparently lured her into meeting him because he posed as a teenager online over multiple platforms and then later reveals he is an adult. Savannah is said to suffer from depression and other mental illness, so she is a likely target for scumbags like Ice.
src
This scumbag looks like a real winner doesn't he? Personally, I believe there is a special place in hell for people like William Ice and I say this as someone that doesn't even believe in hell. Of course he took the coward's way out when he killed himself after realizing that he would not be able to outrun the police and to me that is a little bit disappointing. You might be aware of the fact that criminals that go to jail for messing with kids don't normally last very long because as strange as it might seem, there are certain crimes that are "off limits" even to hardened criminals and if you go to jail for being a kiddy-fiddler, your days alive are very numbered and as bad as prison is anyway (I've never been so I don't know first-hand) the punishment you will receive for getting imprisoned as a pedophile is a fate much worse than death. Ice knows this, hence the taking of his own life.
When police found the suspect's vehicle at a McDonalds they approached the vehicle and ordered the driver to get out of the car. When Ice did exit the car he pulled a gun and began firing at the officers and actually hit one of them. The officer survived and during the firefight, Savannah was able to flee the vehicle and get secured by police. He then fled the scene and was obviously unable to outrun police. Although it is unclear when he actually shot himself, he SUV was trapped on a snowbank on the side of the road when police caught up with him.
Savannah is home safe, but this brings about the potential dangers of the internet for children. When they did a search on Ice's internet activities (I have no idea how they were able to do this) they discovered that he had been in contact with at least 10 other teenage girls in various cities on the eastern part of the US.
I'm not a parent, but most of my friends are and this has been a bit of a wake up call to them as far as monitoring what their kids are doing online. This isn't an isolated incident as far as kidnapping by this method is concerned. Apparently William Ice was already wanted for other child-predator related activities in his home state of Pennsylvania.
I really can't understand the mind of a pedophile and while I know it isn't very nice to wish death upon anyone, the world is a better place without this guy in it. Also, the taxpayers don't have to foot the bill with a unnecessary and drawn out legal proceedings that would eventually land him in prison anyway.
It's nice to see that the Amber alert system was able to provide such swift justice. Hopefully Savannah's parents start doing a better job of parenting from this point forward.