‘We will continue to fight for Noel.’ Everman reckons with presumed death of missing child

The mayor of Everman has not been sleeping well.

As Ray Richardson tries to go to sleep, he thinks of the 6-year-old boy from his town who is now presumed dead and wonders what happened to him. Noel Rodriguez-Alvarez was reported missing March 20 but hasn’t been seen since November, and the investigation into his disappearance has consumed officials in the small North Texas city.

Each day, Richardson walks across the street from City Hall to the public safety building to check on the team of investigators searching for Noel. As he talks about the case, Richardson’s light blue eyes are bright, but the bags beneath them betray his worry.

On Thursday, Everman police gave the update many have feared: The search for Noel has officially become a death investigation. Although the child’s remains have not been found, the evidence collected by investigators led them to conclude that Noel is likely dead, Police Chief Craig Spencer said at a news conference.

The south Tarrant County community of Everman, home to about 6,000 people, is accustomed to some crime trickling in from Fort Worth, which surrounds the town on all sides. But Noel’s disappearance feels personal for town officials.

“It’s been a lot for our little city,” said Richardson, who has lived in Everman since the ‘70s.

Everman is not a stereotypically “quaint” small town.

No cobblestone main street runs through the town center. Most of the shops are locally owned, but new mom-and-pop stores struggle to stay open for long due to limited sales. The parks have needed new equipment for decades, and many of the houses are occupied by renters who are just passing through.

About 30% of residents live under the poverty line and the median income is about $58,000. The town, which is about 50% Hispanic, 27% Black and 20% white, is slightly divided along racial lines, Richardson said.

Outsiders — especially those from Fort Worth — may call the city “run down,” Richardson said.

But the community looks out for its own. Landlocked by the country’s 13th largest city on all sides, Everman fosters a small town pride.

Richardson exemplifies this pride. He grew up in the town and has no plans to leave. He sits on most of the town’s boards and talks enthusiastically about plans for new playgrounds, housing units and infrastructure.

“We’re in discussions now about getting our first traffic light,” Richardson said. “So that’s gonna be big for us.”

Investigation begins

Although small, Everman still sees some crime. But many calls turn out to be misunderstandings or are resolved quickly, Chief Spencer said.

Which is why Spencer was not overly concerned about the missing child call at first. The call on March 20, in which someone anonymously reported to Child Protective Services that a 6-year-old had not been seen for four months, simply seemed unlikely to be true. Especially in Everman, where crimes in the 2.4-square-mile town mostly consist of vandalism and kids shoplifting from Family Dollar.

But as the investigation began, the story became stranger and more concerning.

“As the story started to unfold, it was just so hard to believe,” Spencer said. “We started to get records and we realized this is a really serious situation here.”

The day of the anonymous tip, police went to Noel’s home on Wisteria Drive for a welfare check at the request of CPS. They found his mother, Cindy Rodriguez-Singh, her husband and six other children living mostly inside a shed behind the main house on the property. Rodriguez-Singh told investigators that Noel was living with his biological father in Mexico.

Three days later, Noel’s father told investigators he’d never met his child because he was deported to Mexico before the birth.

When authorities tried to contact the mom again, she was gone. No one could reach Rodriguez-Singh, and police found the family’s car in the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport parking lot. The family had obtained travel visas for India and left the country. By March 24, four days after police first visited the home and when authorities were in the process of issuing a statewide alert, the entire family had disappeared.

That’s when reality hit, Spencer said.

A personal case

Spencer has doubled as the city’s chief police and city manager for 12 years. Richardson described the 20-year police veteran as “a go-getter,” and the Everman Police Department, which has 20 officers, as the “best police department we have had in a long time.” Most residents know the police officers by name and officers can be anywhere in the town within two to three minutes.

While the crime rate may be low, Everman, like most American towns, is not necessarily a stranger to violent crimes. In March, two shootings shook community members: one at a park where a child’s baseball game was being played and another at a home about a block away from the city’s other park. Those shootings, however, seemed to come from outside of Everman.

“A lot of the time, it’s coming out of the city of Fort Worth. So it’s not ours,” Richardson said.

The only case Richardson can think of in Everman that rose to the level of Noel’s disappearance was in the ‘60s. In 1966, serial killer Kenneth Allen McDuff and his accomplice Roy Dale Green kidnapped three teenagers — Robert Brand, Edna Louise Sullivan and Mark Dunman — from a baseball field and killed them.

But Noel’s disappearance and suspected death feels different for the community. For Spencer and Richardson, the idea of a child being hurt in their town feels personal. Richardson, who has four young grandkids around Noel’s age, was a firefighter and EMS worker for 37 years and said calls about kids were always hard on him.

“To me, if there are children (in our town), they’re all our children,” he said. “If you’re here in the city, you’re my child, too.”

Spencer cannot help but think about his own children as he works on the case.

Noel was born at 25 weeks and has disabilities, including a chronic lung disease that requires regular treatment. Spencer has twins at home who were born at 28 weeks and also have developmental challenges. Spencer may have never met Noel, but he and his police department feel a strong personal attachment to the boy.

“I think that’s where a lot of that drive and commitment comes from, and why we’re working on this case so hard,” he said.

At Thursday’s press conference, Spencer’s voice shook slightly with emotion as he described the timeline of Noel’s disappearance and the evidence leading investigators to determine that Noel is probably dead.

“Although the course of this investigation has changed, our commitment to Noel has not,” he said. “We will continue to fight for Noel.”

The ongoing investigation

Since the investigation into Noel’s disappearance began, Spencer, the Everman Police Department and assisting investigators have essentially worked nonstop.

On March 30, authorities obtained a search warrant for the shed where the family stayed. According to the owner of the property, who lived in the main house, Noel’s mom lived mostly in the shed while Noel and some of her children stayed primarily in the house with him.

Investigators also dug under a patio that Rodriguez-Singh had paid to have built in the back yard, but said that did not lead them to evidence that would help find Noel.

The search warrant describes conversations with relatives, who told police about concerning comments and potential abuse of Noel. One family member said Rodriguez-Singh brought the kids over to their house last year and told them not to give Noel any water because she did not want to change his dirty diapers. The relative’s wife gave Noel water anyway, the documents say. When Rodriguez-Singh found out, she started to hit Noel with her keys, the warrant says.

The relative also reported to police that Rodriguez-Singh told her mother she sold Noel to a woman outside a Fiesta Mart grocery store. Through interviews and other evidence, investigators have disproved that story and other stories Rodriguez-Singh told to explain her son’s disappearance, Spencer said.

Spencer has held multiple press conferences about the case, displaying more transparency and media savvy than many larger departments to make sure as many people as possible know about Noel. Without the cooperation of the mother, police said they are partly relying on tips from the public, like a person who called police and said they were on the flight with the family from DFW to Turkey.

On March 31, authorities filed felony charges of abandonment and endangerment of a child against Rodriguez-Singh and her husband, Arshdeep Singh, and say they are working to extradite the couple from India to the U.S.

At the most recent news conference Thursday, Spencer said Noel was last seen in the weeks after his mother gave birth to twin girls in October. Noel was present for the births and appeared malnourished at that time, witnesses told police. Rodriguez-Singh made statements that she thought Noel was “evil” and “possessed” or had “a demon in him,” and that she was afraid he might harm his baby sisters, according to police interviews with witnesses.

No less than 40 investigators make up the task force working to find out what happened to Noel, Spencer said. Authorities from Mansfield, Colleyville, North Richland Hills, Grapevine, Arlington, Fort Worth, Forest Hill and other local departments have lent aid. The North Texas Child Abduction Recovery Team, Texas Rangers, Secret Service, FBI, Homeland Security and other investigators are gathered at the table.

More experts are being brought in to search for Noel’s remains, Spencer said Thursday.

Community stands together

Residents seemed to have different levels of knowledge about Noel’s disappearance.

At Taco Oasis, one of two restaurants in Everman that draw a large local and out-of-town crowd, the 21-year-old manager said she lives on the street over from Wisteria Drive, where Noel’s family lived. Her mother told her about Noel’s disappearance even before the Amber Alert went out, likely because she heard about it from other town residents, the manager said. A cook at the restaurant said she was worried about the case because she has kids of her own.

Three residents eating at a table in the restaurant had varying answers when asked about the case.

“I don’t really know anything about the case,” said an older man, who has lived in Everman for seven years.

“I know very little about it,” the other man, who has lived in Everman for two years, said. “I just think something very bad has happened to that little boy.”

The man explained the case in detail to the woman at the table.

“I don’t know anything about it,” the woman said.

At a city meeting early this week, Richardson said multiple people walked up to him and asked if Noel had been found yet. When he told them no, they were still looking, “they kind of looked at me, like, ‘You know, this isn’t going to be good.’”

Spencer announced Thursday that a candlelight vigil would be held in Noel’s honor on Monday at 8:30 p.m. at the Everman Civic Center.

“I understand that this is not the news that we were all hoping for or praying for,” Spencer said. “And we must continue to stand together as a community and fight for Noel.”