There was no playbook for dealing with the public, no secret list of do's and don'ts squirreled away in a drawer just in case a 5-year-old girl was kidnapped, sexually abused and murdered.
So Michael S. Carona, only a few months from the end of his first four-year term as Orange County sheriff, made up the playbook himself last week, using personal appearances to organize "a modern-day posse" of investigators, the media and the public in a desperate hunt for a little girl, then for her killer.
In a whirlwind week that began with the snatching of Samantha Runnion from a Stanton condominium complex and ended with the arrest of Alejandro Avila, Carona earned high praise--and a lengthy ovation as he rose to speak Wednesday at a memorial service for Samantha at Garden Grove's Crystal Cathedral.
"I can tell you that was a real humbling experience," Carona told the crowd after turning away to compose himself. "It's been very embarrassing to me to hear the words of thanks that come from Orange County and in California and across the nation.... We didn't know the world was watching."
Yet it was Carona's savvy management of the media that helped rivet the nation's attention as he worked behind the scenes to draw together traditionally turf-conscious law-enforcement agencies--including the beleaguered Federal Bureau of Investigation--into a cooperative venture driven to flush out Samantha's killer.
It was a highly personalized effort in which Carona's emotions seemed to bubble just below the surface as the sheriff beseeched the public to help, and addressed Samantha's killer directly, both before Avila emerged as a suspect and after his arrest.
"When I told you that we would hunt you down, wherever you were, arrest you and bring you to justice, if you thought for one minute that I was joking, that we were joking, tonight you know that we were deadly serious," Carona said.
But Carona also drew sharp criticism for issuing a public warning based on a speculative FBI profile that a serial killer might be roaming Southern California.
"I was astonished and surprised" by that blunt warning, said James Alan Fox, professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University in Boston. "There was no evidence the person had done it before. From what I can tell, no other cases have been linked.... This guy [Carona] seems to be interested in parading on television shows."
