People Have Something To Say About That 3 a.m. Quebec Amber Alert Lifted 25 Minutes Later
The three-year-old was found "safe and sound." But there are mixed reactions to the middle-of-the-night alert.
Sûreté du Québec uniform patch.
Authorities set off a Quebec amber alert at about 2:58 a.m. on Wednesday, May 25, after an alleged kidnapping of a three-year-old in Sainte-Adèle in the Laurentides region. The alert stated that a 21-year-old suspect was believed to have "fled on foot" with the child at 9:00 p.m. on May 24.
Police lifted the amber alert about 25 minutes after it went out. According to the Sûreté du Québec, the suspect and three-year-old were found "safe and sound" in the same town where they disappeared.
The circumstances of the incident led some on social media to question the need to send out a middle-of-the-night alert to residents' phones. Others defended the measure.
"Quebec is awake now. Why do I get an alert at 3 a.m. for a kidnapping that is not even in my area?" asked one person in response to the SQ tweet announcing the end of the alert.
Another person calculated it would take 16 hours on foot to reach Montreal from Sainte-Adèle. "Was it necessary to wake up all of Quebec at 3:00 a.m.?" they asked. "Especially since we couldn't even identify [the suspect] if we saw [them]?"
One Twitter user presented the scenario of an "overworked surgeon" shaken from slumber by an alert. "The next day, tired, you make a major medical mistake that ruins the rest of someone's life. Roughly waking people up is not a game..."
They presented no evidence such a thing has ever occurred.
Many others defended the late-night alert.
"'Silent' mode exists on all [f******] cell phones," one Twitter user wrote in response to criticism.
"I don't have children, never wanted any, and have no particular attachment to them," another person said in a post. "But you can wake me up any time for an Amber Alert, and I become a mama bear when tragedies like the one in Texas yesterday happen," they wrote referring to a mass shooting in an elementary school that killed 21 people, including 19 children. "Kids are the future, period."
Someone else put it simply: "Human Life > Sleep 👈🏻"
This article's cover image was used for illustrative purposes only.
