© Scott Anderson/nj.com/TNS Hundreds turned out for a vigil in 2019, just days after 5-year-old Dulce Maria Alavez disappeared from Bridgeton City Park.
All of Dulce Alavez’s favorite possessions — the flowing dresses she loved to wear as she twirled around the family’s home and her beloved dolls and toys — are neatly packed away, waiting for her to walk back through the door.
There’s the battery-operated Elsa figure from her favorite film, Disney’s “Frozen,” that she used to sing with as she danced, often while wearing her Elsa dress. There are the colorful outfits she wore in photos displayed all over the house.
© Dwayne Uzoaru/nj.com/TNS Noema Alavez Perez grows emotional as she speaks about her missing daughter, Dulce Alavez Perez. Dulce disappeared during a family outing to a New Jersey park on Sept. 16, 2019.
And there’s her backpack, featuring characters from “Frozen,” that sits exactly as the 5-year-old left it when she returned from her first days of kindergarten, the folders and papers she last touched still inside.
Three years after Dulce vanished from a Cumberland County park in one of New Jersey’s most high-profile unsolved missing person cases, her family continues to hold out hope she will return home. That’s one reason they remain living in the same rented duplex in Bridgeton that was Dulce’s home before she disappeared, said Noema Alavez Perez, her mother.
© Joe Warner | For/nj.com/TNS Noema Alavez Perez speaks to the media about her daughter during a vigil held in November 2019.
“I have all of Dulce’s dresses in safekeeping. We have not gotten rid of any of her clothes. We haven’t given it away. Her dresses, her shoes, all of it. Her toys, too,” Alavez Perez said.
“We don’t let anyone touch her things. They’re there for her.”
Authorities believe Dulce Maria Alavez was taken from an area near a playground in Bridgeton City Park on Sept. 16, 2019, while her mother sat in a car nearby. As her family and the community prepare to mark the third anniversary of her disappearance, the girl’s whereabouts remain unknown.
Alavez Perez, 22, answered questions from two NJ Advance Media reporters last week in one of her most wide-ranging and in-depth interviews since her daughter’s disappearance. She spoke about the moments after Dulce vanished, her regrets about that day and her lingering suspicions about who may have abducted the girl.
The young mother also acknowledged police may still consider her a suspect and the pain she felt in the days and months after Dulce disappeared as people criticized her and made racist comments about her mothering.
She spoke in a mix of English and her first language, Spanish, saying she has an easier time expressing her feelings about Dulce in her native tongue.
© Joe Warner | For/nj.com/TNS Authorities search Bridgeton City Park for 5-year-old Dulce Maria Alavez shortly after she went missing in 2019.
The mother sat on a red couch in the living room of the modest duplex while her three other children played nearby. The house was alive with laughter and scampering feet as Alavez Perez, who teared up at times, spoke about their missing older sister.
© Dwayne Uzoaru/nj.com/TNS Noema Alavez Perez looks at a photo of her daughter, Dulce Maria Alavez, in the living room of the family’s house. Dulce disappeared from a New Jersey park during a family outing on Sept. 16, 2019.
There’s 6-year-old Manuel, who was with Dulce when she disappeared in the park, but the then-3-year-old wasn’t very verbal at the time and was unable to say what happened to his sister. Alavez Perez, who was pregnant when Dulce vanished, now also has Estrella, age 2, and another daughter, Hope, who is now 1.
Estrella is similar to Dulce and even likes wearing the same kinds of dresses that delighted her older sister, her mother said.
“She reminds me so much of Dulce,” Alavez Perez said in Spanish. “She always looks for dresses in the closet and wants to wear them and it reminds me so much of Dulce.”
Manuel, or Manny as his mom calls him, was unable to speak much as a 3-year-old, but is more vocal now, according to his mom. The family sometimes asks him what he remembers about the day Dulce vanished.
“We try to talk to him and he says that he only remembers a little bit, not that much,” Alavez Perez said. “He tries to say the words, but he can’t find the correct words to use.”
Reminders of Dulce are everywhere. Numerous photos are displayed on the living room walls of the happy, smiling little girl.
Some are the same images that have appeared on highway billboards and mass mailings sent out to homes across the nation since the investigation began.
Looking for the puzzle piece
Alavez Perez was 19 when she took her kids to Bridgeton City Park on that day three years ago.
The family stopped along the way at a gas station convenience store to pick up frozen treats for the kids. The store’s surveillance camera offered the last known images of Dulce.
They arrived at the park shortly after 4 p.m. and Alavez Perez remained in the car with her 8-year-old sister, who was just a few years older than her children.
Dulce and Manny ran off to the playground about 30 yards away, their mother said. Alavez Perez said she sat in the car and checked a scratch-off lottery ticket, while her younger sister remained in the vehicle to do homework.
When they realized they couldn’t see the young kids at the playground, they walked over to investigate and found Manny in tears with his ice cream on the ground, Alavez Perez said.
When she asked Manny where Dulce had gone, he gestured toward a few storage buildings next to the playground, she said.
“I asked Manny, where’s your sister, and Manny just pointed to ‘alli’ (over there) because he couldn’t talk and he just pointed behind the buildings,” she said.
Alavez Perez searched the area, asked others at the park to help and says she grew more concerned when she couldn’t find her child. She phoned her brother, who had a dog, in hopes the animal could sniff out Dulce’s scent.
Just before 5 p.m. — less than an hour after they arrived at the park — Alavez Perez called 911 to report the child missing.
Police began an investigation that grew to include hundreds of police officers and specialists trained in search and rescue. They scoured the 1,100-acre park with the assistance of nearly a dozen K-9s. Drones with infrared technology scanned the area from above and a nearby waterway was drained.
The investigation, led by the Cumberland County Prosecutor’s Office and Bridgeton Police Department with the assistance of the FBI and State Police, expanded beyond the park to include interviews with registered sex offenders in the region.
Investigators say they are confident Dulce was taken from the park, but they won’t say much more about how that may have happened or who was responsible.
Since her disappearance, detectives on the case have conducted hundreds of interviews and visited or communicated with law enforcement officials in 11 states and Mexico, according to investigators. Tips continue to come in, including one received earlier this month.
“Every lead is investigated,” said Cumberland County Prosecutor Jennifer Webb-McRae. “Any information, no matter how small or insignificant, might be the puzzle piece that leads us to identify the person responsible for Dulce’s disappearance.”
She declined to elaborate on recent tips or provide additional details about the case.
“Since we hope to charge and prosecute the person responsible for Dulce’s disappearance, we cannot speak about many of the details of our investigation,” Webb-McRae said.
She has stated several times that investigators remain hopeful Dulce is still alive. A $75,000 reward offered in the case remains unclaimed.
‘Sometimes, I do feel like they think it was me’
State Police issued an Amber Alert for Dulce more than 24 hours after she was reported missing, on the evening of Sept. 17, 2019. That alert included information that the child may have been abducted by a man driving a van. It was information from an unnamed juvenile who was at the park at the time that triggered the alert, according to police.
Based on interviews of people at the park that day, two witness descriptions emerged of a man who may have been in the area. But investigators believe they could be descriptions of the same person.
The first was a light-skinned Hispanic man, 5 feet 6 inches to 5 feet 8 inches tall, with a thin build, no facial hair and facial acne. The second description, from a different witness, was of a Hispanic man, about 5 feet 7 inches tall, with a slender build and about 30 to 35 years old.
In October 2019, police released a sketch based on the second description.
That individual could be the abductor, FBI special agent Daniel Garrabrant said during a 2020 interview with NJ Advance Media, noting that the man had yet to be identified or located.
Garrabrant also theorized that Dulce was likely taken by a stranger in a crime of opportunity.
The FBI has remained publicly silent about their investigation since then, but local investigators say all theories of what happened remain under consideration. They still refer to the men described by the witnesses as people of interest.
While Garrabrant cast doubt in 2020 about any possible involvement by close family members, investigators maintain that no one has been cleared. However, they repeatedly noted the family continues to cooperate.
Dulce’s mother acknowledged police still ask periodically to review her cellphone, including earlier this year.
“I think they looked at my phone again like in February of this year,” Alavez Perez said. “They took it for one day and gave it back.”
She said she was told they were checking the phone again in case they missed something. “I’m like, OK. I’ll be cooperative and I gave it to them,” she said.
Asked if she believes police view her as a suspect in her daughter’s disappearance, Alavez Perez said she isn’t sure.
“I don’t know,” she said in Spanish. “Sometimes, I do feel like they think it was me. Or that it was someone close to me.”
She remains uncertain if Dulce was taken by someone she knows, she said.
“The truth is, I don’t know. Could it be someone trying to hurt me? I don’t know,” Alavez Perez said.
A family in the spotlight
Early suspicion of Alavez Perez focused on her demeanor, with some questioning why she wasn’t more outwardly emotional in the days after the 5-year-old went missing. Some said she didn’t seem to behave in the way the mother of a missing child should act, saying she seemed too passive about the situation.
As she waited at the park for news about her daughter one day after the disappearance, a few spectators grew angry when they saw Alavez Perez eating pizza, she previously said in an interview. Some at the park questioned how the then-19-year-old mother could eat while her child had been missing for a full day.
Alavez Perez didn’t respond to the critics at the time, she said. But she later said she was eating the pizza after going without food since her daughter disappeared the previous day.
Some of the other criticism of the family was outright racist, including comments on a social media post criticizing Alavez Perez for not monitoring her child more closely. “They’re Mexican, it’s their culture,” said one commenter. “They don’t supervise their children like we do.”
Alavez Perez, who was born and raised in Bridgeton, said she doesn’t know why anyone would target her.
“I don’t know why they, why people, would say such things about me and about race or pinpointing where I’m from … This can happen to any person of any color,” she said.
The criticism hurt, she concedes.
“They made me feel so bad. They made me feel as though I really was that person they said I was. But in reality, I know I’m not,” she said.
Attention also focused on Dulce’s father, Edgar Perez, who was estranged from the family and was deported to Mexico a year before Dulce vanished.
Investigators previously said they contacted Perez and he was cooperative.
In seeking cooperation from Bridgeton’s large immigrant community, authorities have repeatedly offered assurances that those with information about Dulce will not be asked about their immigration status.
However, some in the community remain skeptical about those assurances after federal immigration officials briefly detained Alavez Perez’s boyfriend — who is not Dulce’s father — days after the child’s disappearance.
Alavez Perez said she has regrets about the day Dulce disappeared. She wishes she had been more attentive to her kids’ whereabouts at the park. And she wishes she was more demanding of law enforcement from the moment Dulce went missing.
“What I would have liked from the start is for the Amber Alert to have been put into effect much sooner,” she said. “I say to myself, why didn’t I make more demands, demand more help? Why didn’t I demand that they close all of Bridgeton? I should have asked them to block off all the roads and if a car is passing by that it be checked for Dulce.”
The case was initially treated as a missing child investigation rather than an abduction. State Police issued the Amber Alert after they received the witness report about a man possibly leading Dulce to a van.
The witness described the vehicle as a red van with tinted windows and a sliding side door. But, investigators say they combed through video from various surveillance cameras and have identified all vehicles remotely matching that description that were in the area that day.
“We have literally gotten thousands and thousands of red van leads,” FBI agent Garrabrant said in 2020. “None of them have panned out to date.”
‘It’s hard every day’
In response to a reporter’s request, Alavez Perez took some of Dulce’s favorite outfits out of storage, including a pink top with a butterfly on the front and blue skirt with multi-colored flowers. There’s also a pink plaid dress and a white party dress with a rose pattern.
Alavez Perez keeps them neatly packed away, though she knows the clothing would no longer fit Dulce, who would now be 8 years old.
Some of these clothes may look familiar to anyone who has followed Dulce’s case. She was wearing many of them in the numerous pictures her mom has shared with the public since the child’s disappearance.
As the investigation continues, the family is carrying on with the daily routines of life.
Alavez Perez said her other three children still need her and she wants to be a good mother to each of them. She pauses periodically while answering questions to give one of the kids a snack or to help them find an activity to keep them busy while she speaks about Dulce.
Alavez Perez said she plans to return to her job at a seafood processing plant in Millville, working nights so that she can take care of her kids during the day. Her parents, who live with her in the duplex, will look after the kids while she is at work.
Dulce is never far from her thoughts, she said.
“It’s hard because every day that I wake up and start my day, I start thinking about Dulce, about that day. And sometimes I think, what can I do to help find my daughter? Because I can’t be depressed,” she said, her voice cracking and her eyes welling with tears. “For me it’s hard every day. I want to find my daughter.”
The family members have different ways of handling their grief.
Dulce’s grandmother turns to her faith.
“My mom, every time she gets sad, she goes inside her room and starts reading the Bible and she starts praying,” Alavez Perez said. “The Bible helps her a lot. She started doing therapy, but that wasn’t really helping.”
Dulce’s grandfather doesn’t talk much about her disappearance, Alavez Perez said, but she knows he’s hurting.
When she was a child growing up in Bridgeton, Alavez Perez said she felt safe and her parents could let her play unsupervised without fear.
Her feelings have clearly changed.
“I don’t really trust people to be with my kids or to leave them with someone after what happened,” she said. “Every time that I go to a park, I’m scared. What if the person that took my daughter might come after my other kids? Or come after me? … I don’t go by myself, I go with someone else to help me watch over my kids.”
When asked if she has a message for her daughter, Alavez Perez grew tearful as she spoke. Two-year-old Estrella, who had been engrossed in her coloring book, stopped and looked up at her mother.
Alavez Perez asked Dulce for her forgiveness.
“I should have been there, by her side, the whole time,” she said in Spanish. “I wish I could rewind time and be there with her and tell her how much I love her and spend all the mother-daughter time with her. That I am very sorry for not having been such a good mother and for being careless that day with her and her brother.”
Alavez Perez vowed to never lose hope that she will see Dulce again.
“I’m going to continue to look for her and I will continue to wait for her.”
A vigil for Dulce is planned for Friday at 6 p.m. at Bridgeton City Park.
Anyone with information about this case is asked to contact authorities via one of these options:
- Bridgeton Police: 856-451-0033
- Cumberland County Prosecutor’s Office: 856-453-0486
- New Jersey State Police: 609-882-2000, ext. 2554
- FBI: 1-800-CALL-FBI. Select option 4, then option 8.
- Anonymous tips may be sent to Bridgeton Police at bpdops.com/tips or to the prosecutor’s office at njccpo.org/tips.
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NJ Advance Media columnist Daysi Calavia-Robertson contributed to this story and provided Spanish translation assistance. She may be reached at dcalavia-robertson@njadvancemedia.com.
Matt Gray may be reached at mgray@njadvancemedia.com.
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