PHOENIX (AP) — Police investigating the abduction of 6-year-old Isabel Mercedes Celis have scoured her Tucson, Ariz., home, interviewed more than 500 sex offenders and waded through 1,000-plus tips.
So far, they haven’t named a suspect.
But revelations over the past week that Isabel’s father, Sergio Celis, has been barred from seeing her two brothers raised questions about the focus and pace of their investigation.
On Tuesday, nearly a month since she went missing, police said for the first time that she was abducted, rather than characterizing the case as a “suspicious disappearance/possible abduction.”
Authorities have been searching for the girl since her father reported her missing April 21. Family members have said they last saw her in her bedroom the night before. A window was later found open with the screen pushed aside.
A few days after the disappearance, a neighbor told KVOA-TV that she heard her dogs barking and male voices outside her bedroom window around 6:30 a.m. on the day she was reported missing. The neighbor said there were no sounds that indicated a struggle.
Police declined to comment on her account.
Authorities searched for Isabel in a three-square-mile area around her home, ponds, dry streambeds and empty houses. They also searched her house, but a judge has sealed those records until at least later this month.
Police had examined the possibility that Isabel was in Mexico because of Tucson’s close proximity to the border. Federal authorities have been in touch with Mexican police officials who checked hotels, bus terminals and other businesses as they looked for her.
Meanwhile, Sergio Celis, an opera singer, sang “Ave Maria” at a May 6 benefit to raise money for the search for his daughter.
Police announced in a news release late last week that Arizona’s child welfare agency was barring him from having any contact with his 10- and 14-year-old sons. On Monday, after a regularly scheduled news conference, investigators released 911 recordings of him reporting his daughter missing.
He was calm while her mother’s reaction was full of emotion.
Sergio Celis told a 911 operator that he believed his daughter was abducted. Asked to explain why he thought that, Celis said, he couldn’t and that Isabel wasn’t there when the family awoke.
“I want to report a missing person,” he said, calmly. “My little girl, who is 6 years old. I believe she was abducted from the house.”
The tone of Celis’ wife, Rebecca, was frantic. “She’s only 6,” said the mother as she cried. “Can you please hurry and get somebody over here?”
Calls to Sergio and Rebecca Celis weren’t returned Tuesday.
Michael Piccarreta, a criminal defense lawyer in Tucson who isn’t involved in the case but has followed it, said family members are normally eliminated as possible subjects at this point in investigations. In some cases, he said, police focus on family members longer than usual.
“That doesn’t mean they are guilty,” Piccarreta said. “It could mean the police are having difficulty with an alternative theory.”
Police spokeswoman Maria Hawke said investigators have eliminated one theory. “She didn’t get up and leave the house on her own,” Hawke said. She declined to discuss the evidence that led investigators to make that conclusion or reveal details about who they suspect took her.
Experts say the abduction of a child from a home is relatively rare.
Police are holding out hope that Isabel is still alive.
Tasya Peterson, a spokeswoman for the Arizona Department of Economic Security, which oversees the state’s child welfare agency, declined to comment on why Sergio Celis isn’t allowed to be with his two boys. She also declined to say whether there were any past calls at their home.
The Arizona Daily Star had reported early Tuesday that police concluded that Isabel was abducted.
Lynn Jones, a criminology professor at Northern Arizona University, said the public will connect the decision to prohibit Celis from seeing his sons with the 911 recordings because they were both released around the same time.
“So law enforcement, I would imagine, would have to do some work if they don’t want them to be perceived together,” Jones said.
Hawke said it was a coincidence that the two pieces of information were released at once and that the child welfare decision was released to keep the public informed of the investigation. News organizations had been requesting the 911 recordings, which take a while to prepare and happened to be ready on the same day as the child welfare news conference.
“People are free to form their own opinions,” Hawke said.
David Pike, who lives on the same block as the Celis family and whose sons used to play with Isabel’s brothers, said he is perplexed by how calm the father sounded in the 911 phone calls.
“It just struck me as odd. I get excited easily if I think one of my kids are hurt … and then there’s times I’ve just sat there dumbfounded. Maybe that was a dumbfounding moment for him and he wasn’t able to wrap his mind around it right away,” he said.
“Maybe he truly thought she was playing a game,” Pike said.
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Associated Press reporter Terry Tang contributed from Phoenix.
PHOENIX (AP) — The United States could see an official about-face in the coming months in how it confronts illegal immigration.
Supreme Court justices, weighing arguments over Arizona’s tough immigration law, seemed to find little problem Wednesday with provisions that require police to check the legal status of people they stop for other reasons.
Over the last several years, states frustrated with the country’s porous borders have rejected the long-held notion that Washington is responsible for confronting illegal immigration. They passed laws to enable local police to address the problem.
If the court upholds those parts of Arizona’s law, the ruling would codify that type of local enforcement and open the door to such tactics in states with similar laws, such as Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina and Utah.
“I think you’ll see more involvement by local police in immigration enforcement, an involvement that hadn’t previously been seen,” said Kevin Johnson, law school dean at the University of California-Davis and an immigration law expert.
A federal judge put parts of the Arizona law on hold shortly before they were to take effect in July 2010. Other states followed with similar legislation and — combined with other state immigration laws and an ailing economy — played a part in tens of thousands of illegal immigrants moving elsewhere.
“If you want to turn around this invasion, then (you should) do attrition through enforcement,” said former state Sen. Russell Pearce, architect of the 2010 law and the driving force behind other Arizona immigration laws.
Arizona has argued it pays a disproportionate price for illegal immigration because of its 370-mile border with Mexico and its role as the busiest illegal entry point into the country.
The Obama administration said the law conflicts with a more nuanced federal immigration policy that seeks to balance national security, law enforcement, foreign policy, human rights and the rights of law-abiding citizens and immigrants.
During arguments over the law, liberal and conservative justices reacted skeptically to the administration’s argument that the state exceeded its authority when it made the records check, and another provision allowing suspected illegal immigrants to be arrested without a warrant.
Civil rights groups say Arizona’s and the other states’ measures encourage racial profiling and ethnic stereotyping.
Immigrant rights advocates, who believed the courts would reject attempts by states to grab more law enforcement power, were not expecting the justices’ response. They said a Supreme Court validation of the law would frighten immigrants further and cause Latinos who are in the country legally to be asked about their status.
“The crisis here in Arizona would only multiply,” said Carlos Garcia, organizer of an immigration march that drew several hundred people in downtown Phoenix on Wednesday. Authorities said at least nine people were arrested for blocking a street and refusing to move.
“It would mean that anyone, as they are leaving their home — whether they are going to work, to church, wherever they are going — could be asked for their documents,” he said.
The court’s comments surprised state officials and had, thus far, lost all major court battles over the law.
Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne, whose office has helped defend the law, predicted the court will uphold the law because many of its provisions mirror existing federal laws. He said a year from now the state will see even less illegal immigration.
“You won’t see anything that noticeable as far as law enforcement goes,” Horne said. “But you will see less people sneaking across the border.”
It was unclear what the court would do with other aspects of the law that have been put on hold by lower federal courts. The other blocked provisions make it a state crime for immigrants not to have immigration registration papers and for illegal immigrants to seek work or hold a job.
Peter Spiro, a Tempe University law professor who specializes in immigration law, predicted the court would uphold the police check of immigration status in Arizona’s law, but said he wouldn’t be surprised if the court threw out a provision making it a crime to be without immigration documents.
Such a ruling would let police question people about their immigration status if they have good reason to do so, but police would have to call federal authorities to see if they would want to pick up anyone found to be in the country illegally. If federal agents decline, officers would have to release the person, unless they were suspected of committing crimes, Spiro said.
If that happened, the law would be mostly symbolic, but would still carry some significance for immigrants, Spiro said. “It would make it clear that Arizona is unfriendly to undocumented aliens,” Spiro said.
A decision in the case is expected in late June.
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Associated Press reporter Mark Sherman contributed from Washington, D.C.
PHOENIX (AP) — An audio recording has surfaced of an Arizona sheriff playing his refusal to cooperate in a racial profiling investigation for laughs at a fundraiser for an anti-illegal immigration group in Texas.
Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio displayed contempt toward federal authorities who at the time were — and are still — investigating him on two fronts.
His comments in the 2009 audio recording came as the U.S. Justice Department had already launched a civil rights probe of his trademark immigration patrols and the FBI was already examining abuse-of-power allegations for the sheriff’s investigations of political foes.
Arpaio, the self-proclaimed “America’s toughest sheriff,” boasted in the September 2009 speech in Houston that he arrested hundreds of illegal immigrants after politicians and federal investigators started to pick apart his patrols.
PHOENIX (AP) — An Arizona sheriff known for making prisoners wear pink underwear asked an appeals court Wednesday to reconsider its ruling that criticized jail officers’ decision to force the colorful boxer shorts onto a mentally ill inmate who erroneously believed the officers were trying to rape him.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled in a case brought by the estate of inmate Eric Vogel against Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio that the mandatory pink undergarments were a form of “punishment without legal justification.” The court also said it was fair to infer that the selection of pink as the color was meant to symbolize the loss of prisoners’ masculinity.
An Arpaio lawyer who asked the court to reconsider its March 7 ruling had argued its statement about the underwear appearing to be punishment without justification was improper and that no one had an opportunity to present evidence on that issue.
“It trivializes the constitution to make a federal case out of the color of jail garb,” wrote Eileen Dennis GilBride, who is representing Arpaio at the appeals court.
Joel Robbins, the attorney representing Vogel’s estate, said the court wasn’t issuing a judgment on the constitutionality of mandatory pink underwear for all prisoners and instead was pointing out that the issue shouldn’t be ignored in this case.
“It’s just a comment they made as they ruled on the case,” Robbins said.
The court noted that no attorney on either side of the case questioned whether the dressing of prisoners in Arpaio’s jails is a due-process violation when applied to inmates who are not convicted of a crime.
The appeals court had thrown out a 2010 jury verdict in favor of Arpaio’s office and ordered a new trial in a lawsuit brought by Vogel’s estate.
Vogel refused to get out of his street clothes after he was arrested in November 2001 for assaulting an officer who was responding to a burglary call. A group of officers in Arpaio’s jail stripped Vogel and put him in pink underwear and other prison clothing as he shouted that he was being raped. Robbins said the officers didn’t sexually assault Vogel.
Vogel, who was determined by a counselor to be paranoid and psychotic, died less than a month later, after he and his mother got in a minor car accident. Vogel ran several miles from the scene back to his home. He died the next day, and medical examiners concluded the cause was cardiac arrhythmia.
The sheriff’s office has said it started dyeing the jail-issued underwear in the 1990s as a way to discourage inmates from taking home the undergarments after they were released from custody.
PHOENIX (AP) — The pink underwear worn by inmates in Arizona’s largest county are a hallmark of America’s self-proclaimed toughest sheriff. They also have become the target of criticism by an appeals court considering the case of a mentally ill man who mistakenly viewed officers’ efforts to forcibly clothe him as a rape attempt.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Wednesday that strip searches and other steps may be necessary for jail security, but questioned the legal justification in one particular case for Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s policy of dressing an inmate in pink undergarments.
“Unexplained and undefended, the dress-out in pink appears to be punishment without legal justification,” the court said in its majority decision. It also noted earlier in the ruling that it’s fair to infer that the selection of pink as the underwear color was meant to symbolize the loss of prisoners’ masculinity.
The court pointed out, however, that no attorney on either side of the case questioned whether the dressing of prisoners in Arpaio’s jails is, in every case, a due-process violation when applied to inmates who are not convicted of a crime.
Early on in his nearly 20-year tenure as sheriff, Arpaio won points with voters for making inmates wear pink underwear, housing them in canvas tents during Phoenix’s triple-digit summer heat, and dressing them in old-time striped jail uniforms.
Arpaio has joked about the popularity of the pink underwear issue with voters. In January 2010, he told The Associated Press that “you know what my joke is: I can get elected on pink underwear. I don’t need this illegal immigration to get elected.”
The sheriff said Thursday that he plans to ask for a larger panel of the appeals court to reconsider the case. “What do they do next — take away the striped uniforms?” Arpaio said.
In its 2-1 ruling, the appeals court threw out a 2010 jury verdict in favor of Arpaio’s office and ordered a new trial in a lawsuit brought by the estate of Eric Vogel.
Vogel refused to get out of his street clothes after he was arrested in November 2001 for assaulting an officer who was responding to a burglary call. A group of officers in Arpaio’s jail stripped Vogel and put him in pink underwear and other prison clothing as he shouted that he was being raped.
The lawyer for Vogel’s estate has said the officers didn’t sexually assault Vogel and that his client didn’t suffer injuries at the jail.
Vogel, who was determined by a counselor to be paranoid and psychotic, died less than a month later, after he and his mother got in a minor car accident. When the officer handling the accident told Vogel that he might be jailed on a warrant stemming from his previous struggle to wear jail clothes, Vogel ran several miles from the scene back to his home. He died the next day, and medical examiners concluded the cause was cardiac arrhythmia.
Vogel’s attorney, who appealed the 2010 verdict, had been barred by a lower-court judge from calling Vogel’s sister to testify about what he told her about the jail incident and his sense of humiliation stemming from the underwear.
Joel Robbins, the attorney representing Vogel’s estate, said the use of pink underwear has long been a source of amusement for some members of the public. But it’s not funny when a mentally ill man who believes he is going to be raped has officers forcing pink underwear on him, Robbins said.
“That’s where it loses its humor value,” Robbins said.
Jack MacIntyre, a deputy chief for Arpaio, said the court’s decision had serious flaws. The sheriff’s office started dyeing the jail-issued underwear in the 1990s as a way to discourage inmates from taking home the undergarments after they were released from custody.
The Arpaio aide rejected the appeals court’s note about the underwear’s color to “stigmatize the male prisoners as feminine.”
“That seems like a thing made up by a law clerk from the East Coast,” MacIntyre said.
Robbins had argued the testimony of Vogel’s sister wasn’t meant to provide details about the jail incident. It was intended to show her brother’s state of mind and establish the impact of the incident, he said.
In the dissenting opinion, Judge N.R. Smith wrote that the testimony fell outside of the court’s exception to hearsay rules. He said his colleagues on the appeals court erroneously concluded the sister’s testimony wasn’t offered to prove what Vogel had asserted.
PHOENIX (AP) — The pink underwear worn by inmates in Arizona’s largest county are a hallmark of America’s self-proclaimed toughest sheriff. They also have become the target of criticism by an appeals court considering the case of a mentally ill man who mistakenly viewed officers’ efforts to forcibly clothe him as a rape attempt.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Wednesday that strip searches and other steps may be necessary for jail security, but questioned the legal justification in one particular case for Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s policy of dressing an inmate in pink undergarments.
“Unexplained and undefended, the dress-out in pink appears to be punishment without legal justification,” the court said in its majority decision. It also noted earlier in the ruling that it’s fair to infer that the selection of pink as the underwear color was meant to symbolize the loss of prisoners’ masculinity.
The court pointed out, however, that no attorney on either side of the case questioned whether the dressing of prisoners in Arpaio’s jails is, in every case, a due-process violation when applied to inmates who are not convicted of a crime.
Early on in his nearly 20-year tenure as sheriff, Arpaio won points with voters for making inmates wear pink underwear, housing them in canvas tents during Phoenix’s triple-digit summer heat, and dressing them in old-time striped jail uniforms.
Arpaio has joked about the popularity of the pink underwear issue with voters. In January 2010, he told The Associated Press that “you know what my joke is: I can get elected on pink underwear. I don’t need this illegal immigration to get elected.”
The sheriff said Thursday that he plans to ask for a larger panel of the appeals court to reconsider the case. “What do they do next — take away the striped uniforms?” Arpaio said.
In its 2-1 ruling, the appeals court threw out a 2010 jury verdict in favor of Arpaio’s office and ordered a new trial in a lawsuit brought by the estate of Eric Vogel.
Vogel refused to get out of his street clothes after he was arrested in November 2001 for assaulting an officer who was responding to a burglary call. A group of officers in Arpaio’s jail stripped Vogel and put him in pink underwear and other prison clothing as he shouted that he was being raped.
The lawyer for Vogel’s estate has said the officers didn’t sexually assault Vogel and that his client didn’t suffer injuries at the jail.
Vogel, who was determined by a counselor to be paranoid and psychotic, died less than a month later, after he and his mother got in a minor car accident. When the officer handling the accident told Vogel that he might be jailed on a warrant stemming from his previous struggle to wear jail clothes, Vogel ran several miles from the scene back to his home. He died the next day, and medical examiners concluded the cause was cardiac arrhythmia.
Vogel’s attorney, who appealed the 2010 verdict, had been barred by a lower-court judge from calling Vogel’s sister to testify about what he told her about the jail incident and his sense of humiliation stemming from the underwear.
Joel Robbins, the attorney representing Vogel’s estate, said the use of pink underwear has long been a source of amusement for some members of the public. But it’s not funny when a mentally ill man who believes he is going to be raped has officers forcing pink underwear on him, Robbins said.
“That’s where it loses its humor value,” Robbins said.
Jack MacIntyre, a deputy chief for Arpaio, said the court’s decision had serious flaws. The sheriff’s office started dyeing the jail-issued underwear in the 1990s as a way to discourage inmates from taking home the undergarments after they were released from custody.
The Arpaio aide rejected the appeals court’s note about the underwear’s color to “stigmatize the male prisoners as feminine.”
“That seems like a thing made up by a law clerk from the East Coast,” MacIntyre said.
Robbins had argued the testimony of Vogel’s sister wasn’t meant to provide details about the jail incident. It was intended to show her brother’s state of mind and establish the impact of the incident, he said.
In the dissenting opinion, Judge N.R. Smith wrote that the testimony fell outside of the court’s exception to hearsay rules. He said his colleagues on the appeals court erroneously concluded the sister’s testimony wasn’t offered to prove what Vogel had asserted.
Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer speaks to reporters outside the Supreme Court in Washington, Wednesday, April 25, 2012, after the court's hearing on Arizona's "show me your papers" immigration law. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)(Credit: AP) 