A federal judge has nixed a powerhouse law firm’s bid to work with city cops hunting for missing 8-year-old Patrick Alford, who vanished from a city-monitored foster home.
Lawyers from Skadden, Arps were seeking access to the police investigative file for review by their respected private eye Joseph Spinelli, a former FBI agent and state inspector general.
The firm was appointed to represent Alford’s interests after his troubled mother sued the city Administration for Children’s Sevices and the Brooklyn foster parent for failing to protect the boy. The NYPD adamantly opposed giving Spinelli a look at the file, arguing it might compromise the identity of informants and witnesses.
“Our only interest in requesting the investigative file is to seek the safe return of our client,” Skadden lawyer Jonathan Lerner said in court papers.
“It is hard to believe the city would stubbornly deny this missing child the advantage of having a highly professional private investigation firm join the effort to locate him if he were from a more priviliged and influential background,” Lerner added.
Brooklyn Magistrate Steven Gold said earlier this week that he would be over-stepping his authority if he ordered the NYPD to open the missing person file.
“I’m not going to substitute my judgment for the police commissioner and the detectives who work under him to determine how to go forward,” Gold said.
Alford disappeared after his foster mother sent him to take out the trash in her Starrett City building on Jan. 22, 2010.
Cops initially focused on Alford’s mother, Jennifer Rodriguez, of Staten Island, but she has passed two lie detector tests, according to her lawyer. Rodriguez had called ACS for help while she sought drug abuse counseling.
Cops have knocked on 15,000 apartment doors, followed up on tips in New York City and out of state, interviewed dozens of bus drivers, reviewed phone records and surveillance tapes and searched on land, sea and by air.
“We are concerned that the intrusion of a private investigator could be a detriment to the well being of a child who may have been kidnapped and whose life may be in danger,” city lawyer Suzanne Halbardier said in court papers.
