“It gives us hope,” family optimistic with release of new age-progressed image of missing baby
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (KRDO) - On July 15, 1986, seven-month-old Christopher Abeyta went missing from his family's home in Colorado Springs.
Since then, Colorado Springs Police have made no arrests, and the family hasn't seen or heard from baby Christopher.
But they're not giving up hope.
RELATED: New age progression image released for boy abducted out of Colorado Springs
The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) released this photo last week. It's an age-progressed image of what a 39-year-old Christopher would look like today.
Over the years, the Abeyta family has had nine aged-up images of Christopher created, trying to keep his disappearance in the public eye in hopes it leads to new tips.
While family members tell KRDO13 Investigates they are confident in the accuracy of this image, they're not putting all their hope into this one image.
Rather, his youngest sister called it one tool in the toolbox to find him.
"I also do have a concern that people would be just looking for a person that looks like them without looking at there's going to be circumstances with that person," Denise Abeyta Alves says they're not looking for look-a-likes.
"There's got to be, hey, they don't have infant pictures of up until seven months old. There are questions about their identity," Denise Abeyta Alves said. "And then they have to look at Christopher's case information."
Denise Abeyta Alves was 15 years old on July 15, 1986, when her baby brother went missing. Details of that night have been burned into her mind. They had family friends over for dinner, her parents' anniversary had just passed, and baby Christopher had hit some milestones.
"It was the first time he grabbed his hands on the coffee table and raised himself up," Abeyta Alves reminisced. She added that it was the first night she bottle-fed him and even offered to tend to him that night if he woke up crying, but that didn't happen.
Instead, after the family went to sleep at 12:30 a.m., something else happened in the middle of the night.
"I heard her [my mother] very loudly. 'Christopher, he's not here. Where's Christopher? He's not here," Abeyta Alves remembered the panic from the next morning.
In the passing days, months, and years, Abeyta Alves says the family realized they were being stalked. She remembers receiving consistent hang-up calls late at night to her home and her uncle's home in Pueblo— even once when a woman showed up at her grandparents' home looking for family pictures. The woman told them it was for a high school class reunion, which Abeyta Alves says they later learned was never planned.
As of publication, no arrests have been made.
Worth a thousand words
This most recent image of a 39-year-old Christopher Abeyta was created by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC).
In an NCMEC blog post from February, the organization says a team of four forensic scientists is "responsible for the creation of more than 7,800 age progressions of long-term missing children and more than 300 reconstructions of unidentified deceased children."
NCMEC says their artists work in Adobe Photoshop and study skull development, analyze family traits and use ancestry clues when creating the aged-up images.
It's come a long way since the late 1980s, when the Abeyta family was relying on sketch artists.
More information and updates about Christoper Abeyta can be found on the Facebook page run by the family.
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