IMO No one saw a thing. One of the rarest stranger abductions. She literally vanished into thin air. Then they botched the investigation by focusing on mom for way too long. I'm sure them being poor, having broken English and being Mexican played a part in it too. They just didn't take them seriously.
Even here, at the beginning, I remember people speculating on cartel involvement or gang affiliation. Why? Because she's Mexican? I haven't been on this board that long (only found it when Dulce vanished) but is the norm to think a gang took a kid or a cartel was involved?
I'm not sure that the case wasn't taken seriously as the FBI seemed to be brought in quickly and on many cases on WS people scream for attention on missing cases or FBI involvement and Dulce did get a good amount of visibility quickly IMO.
Now that we know more details about the lack of eyewitness accounts, it even makes more sense that the Amber Alert was delayed too. As you said, we seem to have a case with a 5 yo that vanished into thin air. I don't believe this as I believe there is someone in the community that knows something but for whatever reason they will not speak.
This case is IMO somewhat unusual for WS in that Bridgeton is a largely latino area and a lot of the usual sleuthing couldn't be done without language skills and even with language skills it was challenging IMO. I spent hours on social media reading trying to understand what locals were saying and I'm sure LE did the same. But putting the latino issue aside, whenever a missing case happens it is typical to try to understand the town/city and dynamics of the situation and so what you saw play out here wasn't that different other than it took longer to understand the area due to lack of locals in the early days of the case I think.
I think before you
@JerzeyGirl and some other locals including
@PunkCake came on to the thread that people were struggling to understand why this Dulce case was different. The Dulce case was IMO different not only because of her age/5 but because of the dynamics of her family (large extended family going from US to Mexico) and the bigger issues in Bridgeton which make solving this crime so very challenging. We also had no eyewitness account of a perp and allegedly zero CCTV that was useful to LE.
I think the reason the gangs were investigated or discussed was that in areas with gangs and organised crime groups, its pretty typical that these groups know what is happening on the streets and they have a good idea of who all is around in terms of criminals etc. In some cities, LE is able to work with gangs to solve some street level crime, in particular murders of children or violence against children. In many places with gangs, there is no way local folks would speak to LE too. Gangs via connections with cartels increasingly are getting involved with human trafficking and this does include small children but the Dulce case is odd though because I think most of the stats of trafficked children have them being closer to 8-10 yo.
Think about the complexity of Dulces extended family. Mom is 19, has 2 children with 2 different fathers and neither father seems to be in the picture. BUT, one of the fathers (Dulce's) seems to have the same last name as Grandma and Grandma seemed to be in touch with the father (but are they related? We don't know. We also don't know father of 3 yo son and this persons relation to the family).
So, just with 2 children you now have 2 dads and all of their respective families to check out and many of the family members might be in Mexico too. We also have Mom current BF who was picked up and held by ICE, non documented and uncertain work history. This whole ICE situation sent a chill into the community. We then had the politics of the AG comments about non documented people further inflaming the situation IMO and later the Gov. weighing in adding more confusion and so a political mess that looked bad to the locals became even more uncertain. We then had the local jails releasing non document serious criminals into the general population and ICE had to issue a most wanted list and try to track down these dangerous people. A couple of these ICE releases did impact the Bridgeton area.
The rumours on social media didn't help much either and it was clear that the local people were scared and didn't know what to do, so, it seemed like they mainly kept their mouths shut. LE had a nearly impossible task IMO to get the community to help so far as I could tell but again as an outsider who truly knows.
We have Mom with 2 children, five months pregnant, living apart from her family and her children, no Mom school since age 14, no Mom work or means to support herself or her children. Mom was sitting in car between 30-50 yards from playground and saw nothing of what happened to Dulce. 3 yo brother who was on the scene is non verbal. Mom called brother to look for her daughter and didn't immediately call 911. 911 call seemed largely botched IMO so conflicting information made it out to LE at a time when it might have made a difference. By the time LE came and searched, perp and Dulce could have been 30-40 miles away from Bridgeton. 20+ people playing basketball adjacent to the play area seemed to see nothing of value. An unknown number of people might have seen something but 'melted away' and didn't contact LE. This no doubt was a very difficult puzzle for LE to put together and I'm not at all sure they managed to crack it.
The cartels were brought up if I recall because of their known ties to human trafficking, including sale of minor children into slavery. One of the other paths the thread went down was child abduction for *advertiser censored* and also for harvesting body parts.
These cases usually get solved by tips and someone from the community that knows something. I'm not sure if LE knew how to access the community or why some community leader or priest that was tied into the community didn't come forward to help? Maybe these community types have been working behind the scenes with LE. IDK but we didn't see any of them come forward as we have seen in other cases.
I'm grasping at straws and thinking of other cases and how they were solved to see what else could have been done that wasn't done by LE and FBI. If the community of Bridgeton were too scared of coming forward and there was no valid eyewitness account of the abduction and CCTV didn't provide any substantive leads then the case goes cold.
MOO