Keep Georgia Safe Inc

From Gary Martin Hays, founder of Keep Georgia Safe:

Within a span of 64 days in 2008, three young women from Georgia or with ties to the state were abducted and murdered.   On January 1, 2008, Meredith Emerson was hiking on Blood Mountain in North Georgia with her dog, Ella, when she was abducted, held captive for several days, and then murdered.  On March 4th, Lauren Burk, from Marietta, Georgia, was a freshman at Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama.  While walking across a dorm parking lot, she was forced into her car at gunpoint, and later shot and killed.  Within hours of Burk’s abduction, Eve Carson, from Athens, Georgia, was at her home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina where she was attending the University of North Carolina.  She was studying when two men broke into the house and took her at gunpoint.  A couple of hours later, she was murdered.

 

The death of these three young women greatly affected me as my wife and I have 3 young daughters.  We struggled with what we could do to make sure our girls were safe in this world.  Through a mutual friend, I met Viviane Guerchon, the mother of Lauren Burk.  I expressed my deep condolences to her over the loss of her daughter.  I told her about my daughters and how I wanted them to be in karate classes so they would know how to defend themselves.  I’ll never forget her response:

“I think it is good that your daughters know how to defend themselves.  I think it is more important that they know how to avoid ever putting themselves in dangerous situations.”

This made perfect sense, but I, like so many others, placed the idea of prevention and education lower in importance than that of reacting or responding to dangerous situations.  Think about it for a moment: We see child safety organizations pushing “Child ID” kits every day.  They tell us if our child is ever abducted, "we can identify the body through DNA taken from your kid".  This makes NO sense whatsoever!  How is this PREVENTING harm from being inflicted on your child?

Viviane Guerchon is the reason I started Keep Georgia Safe.  She has made it her goal to see that no other parent would endure the never-ending nightmare she experiences because of Lauren’s murder. 

God Bless everyone and please know we are pursuing our mission every day to educate families on how to be safe.