UPDATED: CARTHAGE CHILD KIDNAPPED

Mound Street from Meridian Street to Elm Street is blocked as of press time and dozens of police officers and Missouri Southern’s police academy students are searching for an eight-month-old boy, Eddie Alegandro Salazar, that police say was abducted from the home at 227 E. Mound St.

Neighbors said they didn’t hear or see anything at around 11 p.m. on Friday, the time Carthage police said two men broke into the home, beat a man unconscious and kidnapped his young son.

Carthage Police said the call reporting the kidnapping came in about 11:06 a.m. on Thursday to 9-1-1 dispatchers.

“The police came over and asked if I’d seen anything and I told them no,” said Pam Boswell, a volunteer at the Carthage Crisis Center who lives next door to the home where the child was kidnapped.

“The dog started barking so I let her out in the pen next to my house and I saw a sheriff’s car drive by and shine his spotlight in the neighborhood about 11:30 p.m. then I went to bed,” Boswell said. “The officers came over about midnight and asked me if I’d heard anything. I went to bed early last night so I didn’t.”

Jennifer Bradley, who lives with her roommate Bobby Viar, on Elm Street facing Mound Street, said she got home from work at about 11:30 p.m. and noticed police cars in the area.

“I was just about to fall asleep when officers came to the door and asked if I’d seen or heard anything,” Bradley said. “There are a lot of kids in this neighborhood who play outside so this is a big concern to me.”

Viar agreed.

“This neighborhood is full of kids,” Viar said. “I don’t know what I would do if it were my kid, I’d be crazy out of my mind right now. I hope they find the kid.”

AMBER Alert

Carthage Police issued an AMBER Alert at about 2 a.m. Friday for eight-month-old Eddie Alegandro Salazar, described as about three feet tall, weighing about 20 pounds, with black hair and brown eyes and wearing a blue short-sleeved body suit, and white socks. Police say the boy has a birthmark the shape of a lung on his right arm.

Carthage Police Chief Greg Dagnan said officers spent the night verifying that this was a real kidnapping and gathering information.

“We try to verify this kind of thing before we send out an Amber Alert,” Dagnan said. “We know the effectiveness of these alerts is lost if we send out lots of alerts that aren’t real so we try vigorously to verify everything we  can before sending one out.”

Dagnan said police are not sure why the two masked men broke into the home on the north side of Carthage or whether their intentions were to take the child all along.

“We know there was forcible entry and people were assaulted in the home,” Dagnan said. “Whether the intent was to take the child in the first place, that was the end result.”

Police said the men knocked the father unconscious before ransacking the home and taking the child.

“We’ve spent all night talking to family members and trying to find any connection to anyone who might have wanted to take the child,” Dagnan said. “But to tell you names of suspects, I can’t do that right now.”

The Scene

More than 20 Missouri State Highway Patrol vehicles were parked in a one-block radius surrounding the home where the kidnapping occurred.

Also on the scene were officers from Webb City, Carl Junction, Joplin and the Jasper County Sheriff’s Department. Law enforcement academy students from Missouri Southern State University were also on the scene.

Patrol Spokesman Sgt. Mike Watson said he didn’t have an exact count of how many officers were on the scene but the officers were divided into teams and fanning out across the area surrounding the home.

“This is still an active search, we’re still looking for this child in this neighborhood,” Watson said. “The students give us extra eyes and we are able to cover more ground than we could with just the officers on the scene.”

Watson said police had scheduled a press conference for 2 p.m. today at Memorial Hall in Carthage where they hoped to release more details about the incident. 

A nice family

Boswell, who said she’s lived in the neighborhood for 30 years, said she had met the man and woman and a toddler who lived in the home next door a number of times and they seemed like nice people.

She said she spoke to the father more often than the mother because she didn’t speak English and he did.

“He was real friendly and she would always wave when I saw her,” Boswell said. “They were nice people. He had a boxer puppy and I came out and talked with him about puppies a few times.”

Boswell said the family moved into the home last summer. She had met a toddler but had never met the baby.

“This is a quiet neighborhood, never too much of a ruckus here,” Boswell said. “The man who lived in that house before this family had heart trouble and we’d see an ambulance there some times. We also had a fire back behind my house a few years back but that’s about it.”

Boswell said she saw a tow truck come in early Friday morning and take the family’s car. 

“I just hope that family’s alright and they find that boy okay,” she said. “It’s scary. I’ve got grandkids and it’s just scary.”