Baby’s body recovered from river

The frantic search by law enforcement officers and volunteers for a tiny baby, reported kidnapped by masked men, ended tragically on Saturday when searchers found the baby’s body lodged against a fallen tree in the Spring River.

Carthage Police Chief Greg Dagnan announced on Saturday that Eddie Salazar Sr., 28, Carthage was the prime suspect in the death of his eight-month-old son, Eddie Alegandro Salazar Jr.
Dagnan said Salazar Sr., was charged on Saturday with one misdemeanor charge of filing a false report and was being held in the Carthage City Jail on $100,000 bond.

No charges have been filed in the actual death of the baby, Salazar Jr. Dagnan said Salazar Sr. is the prime suspect in the case but because he is in custody on another charge and with such a high bond, the Jasper County Prosecutor’s Office has given investigators a little extra time to check leads and conduct an autopsy on the child.

“We are in contact with the Jasper County Prosecutor’s office, we have talked to them almost continuously throughout the day since the information came to us that we had found the body of the child,” Dagnan said on Saturday. “At this point, since Mr. Salazar is charged and on $100,000 bond, they are going to allow us to do a little more investigation. We have all the investigators here so we are continuing through the night, following on all the leads because we do have everybody here.”

Dagnan said the autopsy will be conducted at 10:30 a.m. Monday at the Boone County Medical Examiner’s Office in Columbia.

Changing stories

Investigators focused on the father after the original story he gave to police, about two masked men breaking into his home, beating him up and taking his child, fell apart under closer scrutiny.
In the first of two press conferences held on Saturday, Dagnan said investigators spoke to a person Salazar Sr. said was one of the masked men he said entered his home and took the baby.

“At this point our primary and only suspect in the death of Eddie Salazar Jr. is his father, Eddie Salazar, who, as we discussed earlier, has been charged with filing a false police report,” Dagnan said. “I do want to clarify there that when we say the only (suspect) that’s the only one at this point. As we said at a press conference earlier today, there were other people who were eliminated. We did not solely focus on him, in fact he was not the focus of the investigation until the contradictions in his statement came to light.”

For more than 24 hours after the initial report at 11:06 p.m. on Thursday, hundreds of law enforcement officers, Carthage city employees, firefighters and students from the Missouri Southern State University Police Academy canvassed a 20-square-block area around the Salazar home at 227 E. Mound St.

Dagnan said in the early morning hours of Saturday, a tip from a source Dagnan declined to reveal caused them to move the focus of their investigation to a bridge over the Spring River on County Route 85 near Harmony Road east of Carthage.

“We did have some investigative common sense that had us there,” Dagnan said. “We likely would have found the baby without the information but we simultaneously had investigative information that made us prioritize that location.”

It was about 3 p.m., less than half an hour after Dagnan’s first press conference of the afternoon and just as reporters, accompanied by Missouri State Highway Patrol Sgt. Mike Watson, arrived at the County Road 85 bridge that word started spreading that the baby had been found.

Jasper County Sheriff Archie Dunn announced a baby’s body had been located in the water about a half mile downstream from the bridge wedged against a log or limb in the water.

“We were truly hoping to find this child alive even though we knew the odds were not great and that did not happen,” Dagnan said. “It was a combination of investigative information that led us to that area. Some Joplin police officers on a foot team and some water patrol officers that were in a boat converged on the body at approximately the same time.”