Intensity of search for Isabel revealed

Police on Thursday made public more than 500 pages of reports filed by officers who were involved in the search for 6-year-old Isabel, who was reported missing from her midtown home on April 21.

The investigation has cost police more than $1 million and involved hundreds of officers from various agencies. No arrests have been made.

Most of the police reports were similar in detail, briefly spelling out each officer's involvement in the case. The reports were primarily from officers who conducted searches, canvassed neighborhoods or followed up on tips reported by the community.

Details from the reports include:

• An officer conducted some of the first interviews with Isabel's family after she disappeared. Isabel's mother, Becky Celis, was visibly upset and crying intermittently during a brief conversation, which was held away from the rest of the family members.

Isabel's father, Sergio Celis, told an officer that he grew up in the neighborhood and his family had recently moved back to the area. Celis said he knows most of his neighbors, including a sex offender who lives nearby, and didn't believe any of them took his daughter. The parents were interviewed separately.

• DNA samples were taken from Isabel's parents and brothers on the morning of her disappearance. An officer wrote that he took swab samples from their mouths. Also, all the bedding from the Celis home was removed, police said. Writings on Isabel's closet-door frame and walls were photographed. Blood was collected from Isabel's parents.

• Officers conducted intensive searches for days, stopping and questioning all people walking or driving in different areas around Isabel's home in the 5600 block of East 12th Street. They also questioned numerous sex offenders and as many residents as they encountered in nearby homes and apartments. Officers reviewed hours of video footage taken from traffic cameras around town looking for vehicles that had young children in them.

• Officers checked vacant buildings and homes, schools, desert areas, parks, tunnels under roads, lakes, an old drive-in theater and retention basins. The initial search spread to nearly every part of the city and extended as far east as Redington Pass. Officers also checked backyard pools and, in one case, an underground bomb shelter.

• Numerous reports were checked out in the following days of people seen walking, driving or in businesses with a young girl who looked like Isabel.

• Police also received tips from psychics and others who either claimed they had dreams that revealed Isabel's location or gave suggestions to officers.

• Police searched a truck belonging to one of Isabel's uncles on April 24.

Sergio's job records

The reports also detail how police looked into Sergio Celis' employment at a dental-surgery office.

• After getting a subpoena, the office turned over Sergio's employment records, a report states.

The office manager told police that Sergio Celis did not administer "anesthesia or drugs to patients, but he does prepare them for the doctors."

• Police also interviewed several of the doctors who own the surgery office where Sergio works. They all described him as a "model employee," the report states.

They told police he is "steady, reliable, dependable, a quick learner, gets along well with staff, co-workers and patients."

The doctors said Sergio Celis doesn't regularly socialize with any other employees outside of work. He never borrowed money from them, the doctors told police.

He's been employed at the office as a surgical assistant since 2008, the doctors told police.

The reports state the doctors said they had no reason to believe that Sergio Celis was a "substance abuser." They also said the family did not appear to be struggling financially or to be living beyond its finances, the reports state.

Police have classified Isabel's disappearance as an abduction, and the parents have not been ruled out as suspects, police said recently.

Sergio Celis entered into an agreement with Child Protective Services to stay away from his two sons. Isabel's siblings are in the custody of their mother, police have said.

Becky Celis told participants in a candlelight walk last week that the voluntary separation has been hard on her husband.

"A dog going crazy"

Many of the reports detail what nearby residents saw or heard around the time of Isabel's disappearance.

• Several reports list details about barking dogs and strange vehicles.

One officer reported that a resident on East 13th Street said she heard a "dog going crazy barking" at a house on East Cooper Street at about 2 a.m. April 21.

She also reported that around 8 a.m., she encountered one of Isabel's brothers walking toward an LA Fitness on Wilmot Road. She said the boy told her that he was looking for his missing sister and that he was crying.

• In another report, a man flagged down a police officer in the 5800 block of East Speedway and told the officer he had seen a little girl who appeared to be 6 or 7 years old running down North Columbus Boulevard late at night.

Officers checked the surrounding area but did not find anyone.

• Another officer wrote that he was sent to a motel in the 3300 block of East Benson Highway. Someone had called 911 saying he had Isabel and if police did not respond in 10 minutes he would kill her. The officer searched the area and questioned people staying in the motel but nothing suspicious was found.

• Another officer wrote that he was assigned to stop people entering and leaving a neighborhood at 12th Street and Van Buren Avenue, east of Isabel's house, on April 24. His report listed all the people he spoke with and the reasons they were driving or walking in the area.

The officer said a woman approached him and said she had been at Sears Park on East 14th Street south of Park Place mall and found a small pair of children's stockings, large shoe prints and tire tracks, a cigarette package and a receipt for a man's hat. He advised the woman to return to the park and call 911, which she did.

• A neighbor reported increased vehicle traffic in an alley by the Celis home days before Isabel was reported missing. He saw a 1990s minivan with tinted windows and a Ford Focus, possibly a 2001 model, with tinted windows.

• Another officer's report was 11 pages long, listing the names and phone numbers of every person he and several other officers questioned at an apartment complex.

• One officer wrote that on April 24, a man told him he had been digging in the trash behind businesses on East Irvington Road and found a plastic garbage bag with maggots and hair inside. Officers went to the business and found the bag, which contained a dead animal.

• Another officer wrote in a report that on the morning of Isabel's disappearance, he was canvassing a neighborhood on East 12th Street. He said a family told him about several suspicious vehicles they saw driving in the neighborhood that afternoon - one a Dodge Ram truck, another a Honda hatchback. They weren't able to get license plate numbers, the report stated.

The officer wrote he also searched a nearby house and an underground bomb shelter in the backyard of the house.

State Department of Corrections K-9 units initially deployed a tracking dog that alerted once to the residence located directly to the south of the Celis home. A search warrant was served on the house.

• In another report, an officer details how a set of footprints was discovered on top of a small electrical box at the rear southeast corner of the Celis home. The footprints appeared to be from a "Wolverine brand work boot or similar type shoe."

Three matching boot prints were discovered in the soft sand or dirt about 5 feet south of the electrical box. Crime scene units processed the prints.

K-9 units also discovered possible matching prints on top of a gas meter on the west side of the house.