Either external or internal. Only two possibilities. Deja Vu? Ayla Reynolds repeat? Isabel Mercedes Celis is put to bed by her parents (Sergio and Becky Celis) at 11:00 AM Friday night (Tucson, Arizona). Becky goes to her nursing job Saturday morning at 7:30 AM (we hear). The father Sergio notices 6-year-old Isabel, a first grader who doesn’t have school that day, is not in her room 30 minutes later, at 8 AM. Fifteen minutes later 911 is called. Did Isabel Celis disappear as a result of an abduction?
I see from news footage that the Celis family home is an adobe house with fences surrounding it. While its not fortified in a military sense, it nevertheless looks secure enough to me. That is, a supposed abductor would need to know the lay out of the house and he or she would have to jump over the fence, remove the screen, and enter through a window, assuming the window was unlocked.
We hear, the police found one of the screens off and the window was open. This particular side of the house has three windows and is a window to Isabel’s bedroom. This abductor, who is a phantom to us at this point, would have to know (somehow) that this is a window leading to the little girl’s room, if he was going to abduct her in such a fashion. Is this phantom abductor a friend or acquaintance of the Celis family?
This middle-class Tucson neighborhood is searched thoroughly in a 6-mile radius of the Celis house. But nothing is found. A nearby landfill is searched, which is not so good a sign. The focus returns to the house and the parents and their other two children are even asked to leave. The Tucson police want to preserve what evidence they may have from the house. Another disturbing fact we are hearing, is that a cadaver dog may have made a hit at the Celis house.
The detection of the scent of death by these trained dogs isn’t always correct, but still? The parents and brothers met with a Catholic priest on Sunday. The family attends mass regularly at Saint Joseph Roman Catholic Church, which is just a block away from their house. The family priest, Miguel Mariano, noticed how distraught and distressed the family was, with their daughter missing. This is to be expected, but we feel the suffering vicariously, as we witness a familiar sounding story unfolding before our very eyes as we watch the news!
The usual rounding up of local sex offenders takes place also. We hear there are 17 of these kind in this immediate area, but we haven’t heard that any one person has been singled out as a viable suspect. Instead, we sense the focus is going more in the direction that it’s internal. We hear that Sergio and Becky are very nice people, so this is most disturbing, if the Tucson police suspect them in any way. Of course, they have to explore all possibilities as to what may have happened to Isabel.
My one question, that needs some immediate reconciliation, is why didn’t Becky check on her daughter before leaving for work? She would have noticed then, that she was missing at 7:30 Saturday morning (April 21st). Perhaps she usually allowed her husband, Sergio, to perform this routine task. Still, this seems a little odd to me.
Investigators have some additional evidence, we hear, that they won’t make public. This case is even more disturbing than Ayla Reynolds, since we have some very good people who have lost their daughter. We sympathize and hurt for these people, Sergio and Becky Celis. And when we finally find out what happened, we’ll probably have to break-down in disbelief!
