Governor Youngkin signs bill for missing Hampton boy

Governor Glenn Youngkin ceremoniously signed legislation Wednesday establishing a missing children notification program named after a Hampton boy who disappeared more than two years ago.

The bill requires the Virginia State Police, in partnership with the Virginia Association of Chiefs of Police and the Virginia Sheriff’s Association, to establish the Codi Alert program by July 1, 2025. Youngkin officially signed the measure in April.

Codi Bigsby was reported missing from his family’s home in the Buckroe Beach neighborhood on January 31, 2022. His father called police that morning and said Codi was nowhere to be found and may have left the house.

Cory Jamar Bigsby, 45, was later charged with first-degree murder. Authorities believe he killed his son eight months earlier – in June 2021 – when Codi was three years old. Bigsby was also accused of burying the body in Maryland.

Codi’s body was never found, but a Hampton jury convicted Bigsby in March and he is expected to be sentenced next month.

When Bigsby reported Codi missing, many in the community wondered why police did not issue an Amber Alert, a national warning system affiliated locally with the Virginia State Police that notifies the public of possible kidnapping cases.

Amber Alerts are sent out quickly, appear on cell phones, and receive extensive coverage on local television stations and other media.

But Codi’s disappearance was not grounds for an Amber Alert. There was no credible information that Codi had been kidnapped, and investigators actually had doubts about the father’s statements.

Aubrey “JaPharii” Jones, the president of Black Lives Matter 757, was instrumental in the search for Codi. Three days later, Jones started a petition on Change.org calling for a “Codi Alert.”

“His disappearance has exposed a major flaw in our alert system known as the ‘Amber Alert’ – that flaw is that we are only alerted when the child is deemed abducted,” Jones wrote in the 2022 petition, which received more than 11,300 signatures. “Because there was no immediate alert, local citizens had to learn through rumors that a 4-year-old was missing in their area instead of getting an emergency alert directly on their smart device.”

Jones contacted lawmakers. Ultimately, Sen. JD “Danny” Diggs (R-York County) sponsored the “Codi Alert” legislation in the Senate and Del. Bonita G. Anthony (D-Norfolk) sponsored the measure in the House. The bills passed unanimously in both chambers.

“This is going to have a real impact on the world,” Jones said Wednesday after attending the signing ceremony for Youngkin’s bill at the Stafford County Public Safety Center in northern Virginia.

The bill requires state police to establish standards for determining whether a child is missing or at risk. The program would involve agreements between local police departments and participating media organizations.

When a police agency reports a child missing, the State Police must “confirm the accuracy of the information” and the local agency decides whether a particular Codi Alert should be local or regional. The State Police then decides whether the alert will be issued statewide. Media organizations then issue the alerts “at set intervals as determined by the Codi Alert program.”

In some cases, state police used electronic dialing systems to call residents “in the geographic location where the missing or endangered child was last seen” and provide information that “could assist in the safe recovery of the missing or endangered child.”

Diggs said Wednesday that the goal is to “reunite children with their families as quickly as possible” and that “early intervention is key.”

“This new warning will be a valuable tool for law enforcement and parents,” the senator wrote in a statement released by Youngkin’s office.

Children could be overlooked “by the strict criteria of the Amber Alert system,” Anthony added in a statement also released by the governor. “Working in a bipartisan manner with my colleagues, we have made the safety of all children in our Commonwealth our top priority.”

Youngkin ceremoniously signed the bill along with two other bills.

One of the other measures expands the definition of child pornography in state law to include computer-generated images of children.

“The minor depicted does not have to actually exist,” the new law states. The third bill limits the sentence that judges can impose on probation in certain cases of sexual abuse of children aged 13 or 14 to three years.

Peter Dujardin, 757-897-2062, [email protected]