On Patrol: Live Helps Reunite Three Missing Kids With Their Families in a Single Day
On Patrol: Live helped reunite two families after the show played a pivotal role in the recovery of three missing children on the same day.
The prime time show, hosted by Mediaite founder Dan Abrams, routinely leverages the platform and devoted viewer base — dubbed “OP Nation” — to amplify cases with few leads or that might otherwise struggle to break through.
On Patrol: Live runs a regular “Missing” segment, produced in partnership with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) and the Black and Missing Foundation (BAMFI), that has quietly become a powerful tool for law enforcement and distraught parents.
Three episodes of the show in March featured the cases of two parents: Jesse Kapon, whose 16-year-old Juliette Kapon vanished from their New York City home in November, and Chase Desormeaux, whose two young sons disappeared from Lake Charles, Louisiana, around the same time.
By that point, the families of the missing children had grown desperate as the cases remained unsolved for months with no new developments.
Within days, the tide turned on the search for the children in a recovery that NCMEC’s Director of Communications Angeline Hartmann highlighted was unprecedented: “This is the first time that two missing cases (three children) featured back to back on the same TV show have been found in the same 24-hour period.”
“My Juliette is home safe and it’s all because of NCMEC and the television show, On Patrol: Live,” Kapon said in a statement to People. “Through them, she heard my voice!”
Desormeaux echoed the gratitude in a statement to the outlet: “After the television show aired and NCMEC shared my story nationwide, everything changed with the investigation.”
He added: “I was holding on by a thread – mentally and emotionally – with all these months of not knowing if my boys were safe or if they were ok. It’s a heartache and worry that cannot be described. After the television show aired and NCMEC shared my story nationwide, everything changed with the investigation.”
During the show, Abrams and analysts Curtis Wilson and Tom Rizzo appeal for viewers to call hotline numbers if they have any information. That promotion has been credited with helping bring a significant number of people home: According to People, the newly recovered children bring the total number of missing people featured on the show, and then found, to forty.
