(Adds family statement, search details)
By Marisa Gerber
TUCSON, Ariz., April 23 (Reuters) – The search for a missing
6-year-old Arizona girl who authorities said may have been
snatched from her bedroom in Tucson entered its third day on
Monday as search dogs shifted investigators’ attention back to
the child’s home.
The parents of first-grader Isabel Mercedes Celis told
detectives she was last seen on Friday night when they tucked
her into bed, and was found to have vanished when a family
member entered her room the next morning to awaken her, police
said.
After an intense but fruitless door-to-door search of a
6-mile-wide swath of Tucson surrounding the girl’s house over
the past two days, investigators renewed their focus on the
interior of the home, this time with the family removed from the
residence, Tucson Police Chief Roberto Villasenor said.
Two specially trained dogs brought in by the FBI arrived on
the scene late on Sunday, Villasenor told a news conference, and
“the dogs did alert on a few things … but what exactly that is
is what we’re trying to determine.”
“We have information obtained from the dogs that necessitate
our follow-up investigation,” the chief said. “In order to do
that, we secured the residence. We’ve asked the family to leave
the residence so we don’t have to talk about any other
contamination of the scene.”
Police extended their search to adjacent neighborhoods and
were scouring a nearby landfill for clues on Monday, a move that
Lieutenant Fabian Pacheco, a police spokesman, described as
routine “in these types of investigations.”
Police have said they were treating Isabel’s disappearance
as a “possible abduction” and that they were not ruling anything
out and have not identified any suspects in the case.
In a statement read out by Tucson police at a news
conference late on Monday, the missing girl’s parents thanked
well-wishers for their support and said they were cooperating
fully with police.
“We appreciate everyone’s interest in finding our daughter,
Isabel and thank all the volunteers who have come out to search
for her,” it said. “We are cooperating fully with authorities
and are focused only on her safe return.”
FAMILY PRAYED WITH PRIEST
Before she went missing, Isabel lived at the house with her
mother, father and two older brothers, police said. They will be
permitted to return to their home “once we are satisfied that we
have completed all the investigation that needs to be done in
the house,” Villasenor told reporters.
The family’s minister, Miguel Mariano, parish priest of
Saint Joseph Roman Catholic Church about a block away from
Isabel’s home, said he met with her parents and brothers on
Sunday morning and prayed with them.
He described the family as looking distraught and
distressed. “I asked, ‘Do you need anything? Food? Anything from
the community?’ They said, ‘No father, at this time we need your
prayer,'” the priest recalled.
The police chief also confirmed that a window to the
ground-floor bedroom was found open and that a screen from that
window had been removed, but he stopped short of saying an
intruder was believed to have entered the single-story house
that way.
“That would be a potential point of entry that we’ve been
interested in from the beginning,” he said.
Police have said the hazel-eyed child had no history of
wandering off or running away from home.
After cordoning off the immediate vicinity of the house,
search teams made several passes through an area stretching 3
miles in all directions from the family’s home, police said.
Pacheco said investigators had questioned all 17 registered
sex offenders in that area, a middle-class neighborhood
consisting mainly of single-family dwellings, but those
interviews turned up no clues.
At a news conference late on Monday, police said they had
searched an apartment complex about a mile-and-a-half from the
missing girl’s home after receiving a tip that someone had
possibly seen her. It turned up no fresh leads.
Investigators and volunteers were also canvassing residents
and local merchants, handing out thousands of fliers with
Isabel’s photo and looking for any video from surveillance
cameras that might have captured something. Villasenor said
police have received more than 100 leads in the case.
Asked whether police believed Isabel was still alive,
Pacheco said, “At this point we’re hopeful.” But Villasenor
acknowledged later that the odds of finding the child safe were
dwindling with the passage of time.
“Every hour is valuable, and as more pass that causes more
concern and more distress,” he said.
(Additional reporting by David Schwartz; Writing by Steve
Gorman; Editing by Tim Gaynor and Eric Walsh)
