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Winston-Salem police say kidnapping claim that sparked Amber Alert was bogus

EDDIE GARCIA/WFDD FILE

Winston-Salem police say a reported kidnapping that sparked an Amber Alert Monday didn't actually happen. 

Police got a call just after 1 a.m. indicating that a 17-year-old male had been kidnapped from a commercial area on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children issued an Amber Alert.

According to a police report, the juvenile who was the subject of the search had sent pictures and text messages to family members telling them he'd been abducted and that they needed to give money to his kidnappers or he'd be killed.

Around 8 a.m., detectives found the boy not far from where he was reportedly kidnapped. 

Investigators determined that the kidnapping claim was false. The Amber Alert was canceled and he was released into the custody of his mother.

Paul Garber is a Winston-Salem native and an award-winning reporter who began his journalism career with an internship at The High Point Enterprise in 1993. He has previously worked at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The News and Record of Greensboro and the Winston-Salem Journal, where he was the newspaper's first full-time multimedia reporter. He won the statewide Media and the Law award in 2000 and has also been recognized for his business, investigative and multimedia reporting. Paul earned a BA from Wake Forest University and has a Master's of Liberal Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Master's of Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Lewisville.

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