The NYPD and New York State Police are digging through a landfill in upstate New York as part of the search for a missing 11-year-old autistic boy from Brooklyn, law enforcement sources have confirmed.
It is unclear what led investigators to the High Acres Landfill in Parinton, about 14 miles east of Rochester, though it is one of many dumping sites for refuse hauled out of New York City.
The child, Jacob Pritchett, may have been missing for more than a month, since mid-August, with the boy’s mother telling police she had no child, sources said.
The city’s Administration for Child Services began investigating Jacob’s case after a tipster reached out through a state hotline with concern for the child’s welfare, police sources told the Daily News.
ACS investigators visited the Brownsville apartment belonging to the child’s mother on Howard Ave. near East New York Ave. 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.
Last week, 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.
Officers took the child’s mother to the 73rd Precinct stationhouse, before she was sent with medics to Brookdale University Hospital for an evaluation.
NYPD released a composite sketch of the missing child on Saturday. When asked why a photograph of the child was not made available, a department spokesman replied: “That’s all we have at this time. What we have, we put out.”
Neighbors told responding officers they hadn’t seen the child for six to eight weeks, police sources 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.”
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