“It was just a glance that the witness had of the license plate, but
‘U.S. Navy’ really stuck out,” McDonough said. “It was a fleeting glance that this witness had of everything that took place there, not knowing what it was going to turn out to be.”
The NCIS is among the numerous agencies assisting with the investigation, along with 14 Maine State Police detectives, three N.H. State Police detectives,
Interpol and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, McDonough said. Police are checking with Navy institutions like the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard and Naval reserve centers, he said.
Authorities have received more than 200 leads from all over the country, from Maine to Florida, Alabama, California, Michigan and Wisconsin. McDonough said police are watching Facebook closely, as there is a page on the social networking Web site that has attracted close to 100,000 users spreading the boy’s story. He said
police have ruled out some posts about missing children from Michigan and Oregon that do not match this case.
Any leads associated with reported missing children cases
“have all but been eliminated except through the use of DNA,” McDonough said. The crime lab is in the process of analyzing the boy’s DNA to compare to other missing person cases and are
analyzing mitochondrial DNA, which would allow them to match the boy to a family, he said.
Police are
researching the legality of checking the boy’s DNA against the Combined DNA Index System database of convicted criminals, but said that was not the intent of the
CODIS system and, “I’ll be surprised if we’re allowed to do it.”
http://www.seacoastonline.com/articles/20110517-NEWS-110519797
