Since 1997, the year she went missing, the Palatine father has lived with grief, anger and guilt about the disturbing chain of events that led to Amber Creek's death. He knows it is difficult for people to understand why he asked the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services to take temporary custody of his daughter, a chronic runaway, just weeks before she died. The system failed them both, authorities agree...
Her mother... had custody of the girl until she was 6, when Amber revealed that she had been sexually abused by a man, according to a DCFS report. After moving in with her father, Amber would often cry herself to sleep and had little contact with her biological mother, her father said. Amber began sneaking out of the house and acting out in increasingly self-destructive ways... "Our psychiatrist
wanted her in a locked-in facility," Creek said. "He said and these are his exact words 'Someone's going to kill her if we don't do something.' She was putting herself into more dangerous situations"...
He begged DCFS to take Amber in, but the agency fought his efforts, he said. As a last resort, he took his daughter into the Palatine police station and signed the paperwork that forced the state agency to take temporary custody. He would later come to regret that he hadn't kept Amber at home.
