NYPD detectives on Friday released a computer-generated image of what they believe an autistic 11-year-old Brooklyn boy who has been missing for weeks may look like while the child’s mother continues to claim her son never existed, officials said.
Police believe Jacob Pritchett went missing sometime in mid-August, but authorities weren’t alerted to his disappearance until late September.
When they learned that the child hadn’t been seen at his apartment on Howard Ave. in Brownsville, they went to the child’s mother, who bizarrely told cops and the city’s Administration for Children’s Services that she never had a child.
There was no evidence of a child living in the home when she allowed police to search the place, even though building administrators had a copy of Jacob’s birth certificate and neighbors had repeatedly seen the child from the window.
A family court judge has ordered the mom held at a hospital, where she is undergoing psychiatric testing and care, as cops continue to search for the boy.
Weeks later, the mother still won’t acknowledge her son’s existence and at one point cited her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination as the reason for her refusal to cooperate, a police source with knowledge of the case said.
On Friday, cops released a computer-generated image of Jacob “to predict what the missing (child) would look like today.”
Cops were never able to locate a photo of Jacob and on Oct. 4 released a composite sketch of what the child looks like.
“That’s all we have at this time,” a police spokesman said at the time. “What we have, we put out.”
ACS began investigating Jacob’s disappearance after a tipster reached out through a state hotline with concern for the child’s welfare, police sources told the Daily News.
Agency investigators visited the Brownsville apartment belonging to the child’s mother on Sept. 25, but were unable to gain access and called for police assistance. When officers with the NYPD arrived at the mother’s home, she allowed them entry to her apartment, only to deny being the child’s mother.
The mother was ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation.
ACS agents returned to Pritchett’s apartment with police and investigators to search the building as well as nearby dumpsters — even recruiting NYPD K-9 police dogs to help in the hunt.
The K-9 dogs got a hit on a refrigerator inside the apartment, as well as the dumpsters out back, cops said.
Residents said they had smelled a foul odor coming from the garbage bins in the back of the building at around the time Jacob went missing, although building trash had been collected there for several weeks over the summer. But when cops learned of Jacob’s disappearance, the trash had already been collected, officials said.
Earlier this month cops began digging through the High Acres Landfill in Parinton, NY, which is about 14 miles east of Rochester, and is a dumping site for the refuse hauled out of the apartment complex where Pritchett lived.
An exhaustive search there by the NYPD and state police turned up nothing, a police source with knowledge of the case said.
“We’re still treating this case as a missing person, so we’re doing everything we can to put out images of the boy in case he’s seen,” the police source said.
Neighbors told responding officers they hadn’t seen the child for six to eight weeks, police said.
“We’d be chilling outside, and you’d see the boy in the window,” said neighbor Evelyn Rolon, 49. “He had a little car he played with. He never came out. He didn’t go to school.”
Rolon said she was shocked to learn the boy’s age, saying he appeared younger by his size.
“He was 11? He looked 7 or 8,” she said, adding about the missing child: “It’s horrible.”
Cops are asking anyone with information regarding Jacob’s whereabouts to call NYPD Crime Stoppers at (800) 577-TIPS. All calls will be kept confidential.
