By AP/St. Louis Public Radio
KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Authorities have issued an Amber Alert for a 2-year-old girl reportedly taken by a stranger from her western Missouri home.
The Cass County Sheriff's Department says that Syah Duffy was abducted about 8:30 a.m. Thursday from her home in East Lynne by a woman driving a dirty van with Iowa license plants.
Sheriff's Cpl. Kevin Tieman says the woman staged some kind of ruse, telling Syah's mother she was with a state agency and was supposed to take the little girl.
The Amber Alert wasn't issued until six hours later, while the mother and investigators tried to figure out if this was a domestic issue or a child welfare matter.
Syah has brown hair and brown eyes and was wearing a Mickey Mouse shirt and blue jeans. The suspect is described as a heavyset white female in her 20s to 30s, wearing a grey sweater and blue jeans.