An Amber Alert sent to Texans last week warned that a child was kidnapped by Chucky, a 28-year-old man with auburn or brown hair and blue eyes that is 1 meter tall. His run was given as “Other: Doll”.
The alert, which was sent by email on Friday, warned of a 6 kg suspect wearing “blue denim overalls” and “wielding a huge kitchen knife”. It included an image of Chucky, the killer doll featured in the 1988 terrorist film “Child’s Play”, the first in a series of Chucky films.
The Texas Department of Public Security has since apologized, saying in a statement that the alert was sent as “the result of a defective test”.
“We apologize for the confusion this may have caused and are working diligently to ensure that this does not happen again,” said the department.
People who subscribed to the Texas alert system received the email alert three times on Friday, reported KENS 5, a television station in San Antonio.
The department did not answer questions about how many people received the alert or the circumstances that led to its dispatch.
The alert identified the abductee as Glen, a 5-year-old boy wearing a blue shirt with a black collar. (In “Seed of Chucky” (2004), a doll named Glen is Chucky’s son.)
The alert said Chucky and Glen were last seen at a home address in Henderson, Texas, a city about 130 miles southeast of Dallas. A woman who answered a call to a phone number associated with that address on Wednesday said, “Yes, I’m aware” when asked about the alert before hanging up.
Don Mancini, the director and screenwriter who created the character Chucky, shared a news story about the alert at Twitter, saying, “PLEASE FIND THEM.”
The scope of the erroneous alert, which appears to have been sent only to email subscribers, appeared to be limited. Some Texans who receive Amber alerts via push notifications on their phones said they had not received Chucky’s warning.
There have been cases where the alerts have been wrongly sent with greater consequences. In January 2018, an emergency alert was sent to cell phones across Hawaii warning of a “BALLISTIC MISSION THREAT ENTERED HAWAII”. He urged people to “LOOK FOR AN IMMEDIATE SHELTER”, adding: “THIS IS NOT AN EXERCISE.”
The push notification was sent on Saturday morning, during a period of high tension between the United States and North Korea, by a worker who, according to authorities, had a history of poor performance. The worker thought there was a real threat and misinterpreted the test instructions, officials said.