Cops: Relatives hadn’t seen missing boy in 2 weeks - msnbc.com
Police said they’ve interviewed relatives, family friends and neighbors of a missing Washington state toddler, and aside from his mother, no one reports seeing the boy in the past two weeks.
Bellevue police spokeswoman Carla Iafrate said detectives are questioning everyone close to the family of 2-year-old Sky Metalwala. He was reported missing Sunday morning.
Police have focused their efforts around the home of his mother, who told investigators she last saw him in her stalled car as she and her daughter walked away for an hour to get gas.
“Given the limited amount of information we have, the fact that there’s really no solid leads to follow up on in regard to where he might be. Absolutely, we suspect foul play,” Maj. Mike Johnson of the Bellevue Police Department told NBC affiliate KING5 TV . “Someone close to this family knows what happened to this child.”
It wouldn’t be the first time Sky Metalwala had been left alone in a car. When he was just 3 months old, court records revealed, his parents left him in their sport utility vehicle in a Target parking lot for 55 minutes on a 27-degree day. They only came out of the store to get him after police arrived and asked for the vehicle’s owner to be paged.
The toddler’s disappearance Sunday in Bellevue, a city of 122,000 across Lake Washington from Seattle, came at the height of a custody fight between his parents, Julia Biryukova and Solomon Metalwala. They separated in March 2010 amid back-and-forth protective orders and allegations of abuse and psychiatric problems.
Last December, a social worker determined that there was a “preponderance of evidence” that Metalwala had struck his daughter hard enough to cause bruising, court records show.