CLOVER, S.C. - When a 2-year-old girl went missing from her family's lakeside home just minutes from the North Carolina state line, South Carolina authorities issued an Amber Alert while the Tarheel state held off.

It turned out the child drowned in Lake Wylie and wasn't abducted, but North Carolina's decision angered some South Carolina authorities, who called it a major breakdown in the alert system.

"We're real disappointed with North Carolina not activating Amber Alert," York County Sheriff Bruce Bryant said before Trinity Nicole Casey was found Wednesday just a few feet from her family's dock.

The Amber Alert system is used by authorities to let the public know when a child is missing. The Internet and the media distribute the information, which also is flashed on highway signs.

Lake Wylie sits on the North Carolina-South Carolina state line and the grandparents' home where Trinity drowned is only about 20 miles from downtown Charlotte, N.C.

Even though the home was close the line, Perry Stewart, director of the North Carolina Center for Missing Persons, said he decided against issuing an alert after seeing the story on several North Carolina media Web sites.

"It looked to be a bit redundant to issue an Amber Alert at that point for North Carolina, and that was coupled with the fact that there was certainly no hard proof that there was an abduction," Stewart said. "There was only a partial description of the vehicle."

Sheriff Bryant took nothing for granted, though. Divers had searched the water for several hours Tuesday evening and came up empty. Family members and authorities had combed the woods, and the fiance of the girl's uncle reported seeing a suspicious man and vehicle in the neighborhood before Trinity disappeared.

By midday Wednesday, family members were convinced the little girl had been abducted, but their suspicions turned to sadness when the girl's body was pulled from the lake.

York County Sheriff Bryant faxed a request for an Amber Alert about midnight Tuesday and it was soon issued by the South Carolina State Law Enforcement Division.

"We are basically a suburb of North Carolina. We are that close," said Kristie Jordan, staff attorney for the sheriff's office, which led the investigation. "I think there was an assumption that a sister state would follow through and issue that alert."

Several criteria have to be met for states to issue alerts including the child's age, belief that the child has been abducted and could be harmed as well as information to give to the public that could help the investigation.

But there was not enough information for North Carolina to issue an alert.

"When you issue Amber Alerts you do need to have enough information to give the public something to look for," Stewart said. "We didn't have the descriptive information on the vehicle that we would have needed."

SLED chief Robert Stewart, however, agreed with Bryant that South Carolina's criteria had been met. Robert Stewart said he would like to talk more with North Carolina officials about their decision.

"When other states ask us to do it, we do it. We don't ask a lot of questions," South Carolina's top law enforcement official said. "It seems like there's going to need to be some reciprocity here."

Monica Caison, director of the Community United Effort Center for Missing Persons based in Wilmington, N.C., said her group of volunteers was on standby to help search. But she heard that authorities thought the body might be in the lake and agreed with the decision to not to issue the alert.

"They just didn't have any true information to prove the child was abducted and that's one of the qualifications for the Amber Alert," Caison said. "If a child is lost in the woods, an Amber Alert is not going to do any good. ... I'm sure if they had not found her, it would have went beyond South Carolina."

South Carolina officials will review this Amber Alert to see if changes need to be made. "We think when we have a resource you should use it," SLED Chief Stewart said.