Tension surges in Raven case
Results on tests of burned child could take a week
August 9, 2006
BY JOE SWICKARD and JACK KRESNAK
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITERS
Prayers and rumors swirled and family emotions flared Tuesday along McDonald Street on Detroit's west side as the search for Raven Jeffries, a 7-year-old girl who disappeared in her flowered flip-flops, stretched into its fifth day.
The tension between faith and fear -- which erupted Tuesday when one of Raven's older brothers rushed a TV reporter during an on-scene report -- could be pulled even tauter over the days to come. State Police say it will take a week to determine whether the remains of a severely burned child found Monday in Romulus are Raven's.
Raven's family had hoped for word Tuesday that the body was not their little girl.
The emotions were in evidence as Raven's brother, 19-year-old David Hosler, sprinted at WXYZ-TV (Channel 7) reporter Kimberly Craig as she reported from the family's home during the noon newscast. His voice breaking, Hosler pleaded with her not to link the burned body to his little sister.
"That means you people do not have faith," he shouted.
Minutes later, his and Raven's mother, Brenda Jeffries, spoke quietly with Craig off-camera -- apologizing.
Brenda Jeffries said the lack of any official word for so long is agonizing for the family.
"So far, we haven't heard anything," she said. "It sure does make waiting hard."
Tuesday evening, family members, friends and neighbors clasped hands in a prayer circle, surrounding an array of candles placed in a vacant lot near the family's weathered yellow-and-gray bungalow.
As the impassioned prayers for Raven's safe return increased, police investigations pushed ahead in both Detroit and Romulus, the former looking for a missing person, the latter, trying to identify a body police say bears a general resemblance to Raven.
The missing girl is 4 feet, 2 inches tall and weighs 65 pounds. An Amber Alert was issued for her Friday and remains active.
Officials in Detroit and Romulus reiterated that they could not definitively link the body found in a field Monday to the missing child, and a spokesman for the Wayne County Medical Examiner's Office said a preliminary autopsy failed to identify the body. A forensic dentist was called in to try to identify the body as well.
Meanwhile, the Michigan State Police forensic laboratory in Northville is using DNA taken from the burned body to determine whether it matches hair samples from Raven. While some cases in the lab may be backlogged as long as six months, a case involving a missing child jumps to the head of the line.
But even a high priority analysis takes several days.
Tara Reinholz, a forensic scientist in the Northville DNA unit, said the lab was still awaiting samples they could use for the comparisons. Once the samples are in hand, it will take about a week to complete the tests.
"This isn't a typical case," Reinholz said. "With a child, we reprioritize."
Raven is one little girl among hundreds of children who have been reported missing in Michigan.
According to State Police, there were 594 children ages 14 and younger missing in the state as of July 1, the most recent date for which statewide statistics were immediately available.
Of those, 116 were African-American girls reported missing in Detroit.
As the FBI, State Police and Detroit homicide detectives continued their investigation Tuesday, several men from Raven's neighborhood who are registered sex offenders were being questioned. Detroit police spokesman James Tate said a number of people had been questioned -- some more than once -- and several persons were given polygraph examinations.
"We have questioned just about everybody in that neighborhood," Tate said.
No one was in custody, however, he said.
Rumors circulated along McDonald Street that at least one person, and perhaps more, had failed the polygraph tests.
Tate refused to discuss any test results but said that so-called failures are not necessarily proof of lying. Stress and heightened emotions can skew results, he said.
More than 50 registered sex offenders share the child's ZIP code.
Romulus Detective Sgt. Jeff Lazarski said the burned body was found near a two-track trail by an engineer doing maintenance work on a radio transmitter tower.
"It's fairly accessible area," Lazarski said. "You could drive right down there."
Romulus police said they took a man into custody Monday morning near the scene where the burned body was found, but released him after several hours of questioning.
Scott Gagnon, 39, of Wayne said he was hunting gophers.
"They wanted to know who I was and what I was doing out there," Gagnon said. "They let me go after they checked everything, but it was scary."
Contact JOE SWICKARD at 313-222-8769 or
jswickard@freepress.com.
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