Clayton County PD joining Facebook after struggle to contact family

CLAYTON COUNTY, Ga. — The Clayton County Police Department is creating a new Facebook page after struggling to contact a woman whose son had been dead for weeks.

The mother said officers sent her a message from a Facebook page with a strange name and rap star's photo, so she was reluctant to address it. Clayton County police said they checked several addresses and never could reach anyone.

Anna Creasey Lamb was so skeptical of the page, she didn't call the officer for weeks. The detective was trying to let her know her son, 30-year-old Rickie Lamb, had died after he was hit by a car Jan. 25.
   
Chief Greg Porter said he was not happy with how the incident was handled and he's now making changes.

"I've since instructed my staff to create a Facebook page to try to eliminate issues such as this," Porter told Channel 2's Tom Jones.
   
The department didn't have a Facebook page to communicate with the public, so they turned to a page that is usually used to contact non-law-abiding citizens in investigations.

When an officer sent a message to contact police, Lamb-Creasey said it looked fake because she saw nothing to indicate it was from an actual police officer.  She said the name on the account sounded like a stripper's name. 

"Misty Hancock, and I'm like who is a Misty Hancock? That sounds like a stripper's name or something," she said.
   
Lamb-Creasey didn't call the detective for weeks because she thought it was a scam.  When her daughter finally called the officer on Valentine's Day, the officer told her about the death.
   
That was almost 20 days of not knowing he was dead, and 20 days they spent frantically searching for him. 

"I've been on my job 13 years, and they couldn't track me down," Lamb-Creasey tearfully explained.
   
"We tried to make person-to-person contact," Porter reiterated.

The chief said the family had moved and left no forwarding address. Lamb-Creasey said she did.
   
Porter said his officers bent over backwards trying to contact the family the conventional way. Now, he hopes the new Facebook page will prevent the issues Lamb-Creasey went through. "We fell short and now, I recognize the value of the social media, and we plan on correcting that," he said.   
   
The chief said the Facebook page will be a way for the public to communicate with the law enforcement community and vice versa. Porter said the page should be up soon.

WSBTV