Expert Offers Tips on Staying Safe
WHITFIELD: Ten years ago, a nine-year-old Texas girl was kidnapped and killed. Since then her name has come to represent efforts to rescue children at risk. Now the Amber alert is getting new recognition. CNN's Tara Mergener looks at a little girl's legacy.</s>TARA MERGENER, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): It's been 10 years since nine-year-old Amber Hagerman (ph) was snatched from her bicycle and brutally murdered.</s>DONNA NORRIS, AMBER'S MOTHER: Knowing my daughter, she was a fighter. I know she fought for her life.</s>MERGENER: But her death led the Dallas-area media to coordinate a broadcast alert system that's since been credited for saving from abduction 241 children around the country. Now used in all 50 states, Amber alerts are broadcast over the air, flashed on highway signs and can now be sent to wireless devices when a child has been abducted. Law enforcement officials say the success of the Amber alert program depends on the public.</s>ALBERTO GONZALES, ATTORNEY GENERAL: For the sake of Amber Hagerman and every other child who we've lost in this manner, we must continue to rededicate ourselves to the safety and support of the most vulnerable in our society.</s>MERGENER: To that end, a postage stamp was unveiled Friday to raise awareness of the importance of Amber alerts.</s>ERNIE ALLEN, NATL CTR FOR MISSING AND EXPLOITED CHILDREN: Average people doing average things who are busy, who are preoccupied, need to listen, need to look.</s>MERGENER: A decade after Amber's death, her mother is glad Amber's legacy is making a difference.</s>NORRIS: My daughter is not dying in vain and yet her memories stay in our lives.</s>MERGENER: She hopes other parents never know her pain. In Washington, I'm Tara Mergener, CNN.</s>WHITFIELD: And we look at fighting back in our best of CNN today. A woman working alone in a Utah check cashing business, when a man jumps the counter. When the phone rings, she knocks the receiver off the hook. On the other end, her husband who hears the fight and calls police. This week on "ANDERSON COOPER 360," family safety expert Bob Stuber offered more ideas on self protection.</s>BOB STUBER, SAFETY EXPERT: ... in a parking lot is a more common situation. Shauna here is going to kind of be my victim because we want to show you just a few techniques. For instance, if somebody was trying to grab you and put you in the car, you don't want to get in their car. If you get in their car, you're probably never coming home. Anything can help you do that. Now, in this case, here's a garbage can. Shauna, grab that can right there. If you just held on to something like a garbage can, right there you can look, I could get her in the car or the can, but I'm not going to get her and the can, even though it's just simply lightweight piece of plastic. That could actually save her life. Also in this same type of situation, you have to look around and use whatever you have in your environment, called situational awareness. For instance, in a parking lot, if you're around cars, you could probably use an antenna off of a car, something like this. They pop off real easy. You can break them off, but with that in your hand, it's a very formidable weapon. There's always something in your environment that can make the difference. And I want to show you one more really quick. Shauna, let me get you to jump up here. If she was unloading packages in the car. Now, this is a common scenario, standing back here, unloading the packages, anybody could get to her, but if she was in the front door -- open that door, Shauna and she was standing there. She opens the door all the way and then you open this door at the same time. Now she's created a cocoon where nobody can get to her. I couldn't get to her from here. I couldn't get to her from the front. She's relatively safe in that situation.</s>WHITFIELD: Good advice, I like that. Bob Stuber joins us live now from Sacramento. Bob, good to see you.</s>STUBER: Good to see you.</s>WHITFIELD: All right. Well, we've always been getting a lot of conflicting messages over the years, because we know that kids get a set of instructions of run, call for help. A lot of adults get instructions that they should never go into a confined space if someone who is threatening them is asking them to do so. So is your bottom line message these days is you got to come up with ways to protect yourself, a plan. You got to put a plan in place, because you really do need to fight back. You don't need to be passive in order to think that is going to be what saves you.</s>STUBER: No, absolutely, you hit the nail on the head. You've got to have the resolve within yourself that you're going to resist until it doesn't make sense to resist any longer. To simply give in and say to yourself, I'm going to do what he says and I'm going to be nice and maybe he won't hurt me, that's foolishness. You're probably going to get hurt. You put yourself at that person's mercy and you' now are out of the equation. You're going to get hurt. But you need to learn, everybody needs to learn how to resist with a situational environment type of a plan. In other words, be able to look around you, whether you're at a restaurant, a convenience store, jogging in the park, wherever, at work, there's always things around that you can use, situations, places you can go, your purse -- I could take a woman, sit down with her for five minutes and show her at least a dozen things she carries in her purse, including her purse, how she could save her life.</s>WHITFIELD: A pen being one of those things, right?</s>STUBER: Pardon?</s>WHITFIELD: A pen.</s>STUBER: Oh, absolutely.</s>WHITFIELD: Your keys.</s>STUBER: Your keys.</s>WHITFIELD: The way you hold them.</s>STUBER: A pen, the purse itself, the perfume that you have in there, depending on what is it, sometimes the makeup.</s>WHITFIELD: Interesting.</s>STUBER: Lots of different things. This is all around us all the time. So it's not about, good going through life being afraid. It's simply knowing what you have, what you can use, but the biggest question of all is finally once and for all resolving within yourself, I'm going to resist. I'm not just going to be let away. Then if you get to that point, to where it doesn't make sense to resist anymore, well then it's a different story. But typically if you resist in the beginning and you know how to do it, you will save your life.</s>WHITFIELD: And that is the key of knowing how to do it, because we look at this videotape, whether it be the woman who's fighting back here in Utah or she's resisting. She really isn't putting up a fight like in the previous tape where you see the guys with the baseball bat. So few of us are encouraged to use a weapon like a baseball bat because if you don't use it right, if you try to use a weapon against your attacker, then it could ultimately be used against you. So really, how do you be a quick thinker?</s>STUBER: Well, you're right. You're absolutely right. Going to the baseball bat is one extreme and that's not what we're talking about. And that guy has probably dreamed of that situation.</s>WHITFIELD: He was waiting for them to come back.</s>STUBER: Exactly. We don't live like that. Like the lady in the first tape, she resisted with what she had, knocking the phone out of his hands was a weapon. What you do is, it's not so much a matter of thinking of everything as a weapon. It's a matter of thinking like this. I'm going to resist for the purpose of getting out of here safely, get back to my family safely. That means whatever it takes so that you can get to freedom. As soon as you can, you want to run away. You want to get out of that situation. So you do what it takes to get to that point, but don't necessarily think, well, let's see, if I have the umbrella, I can go at him in a vicious way. It's not about being vicious and it's not about hurting the other person. Yeah, it's about protection.</s>WHITFIELD: Great, Bob Stuber, family safety expert, thank you so much. Great food for thought and great advice on keeping ourselves and our families safe.</s>STUBER: My pleasure.</s>WHITFIELD: More than four months after the storm, the scene in Waveland, Mississippi hasn't changed that much since Hurricane Katrina roared through. We'll take you there straight ahead. Plus, it's now the longest-running show in Broadway history. That's right, the "Phantom of the Opera" has been wowing audiences for 18 years now. Coming up, we go behind the curtain of this incredibly popular production.