Wednesday will mark 20 years to the day since toddler Everlyse Cabrera was reported missing in North Las Vegas.
Cabrera’s disappearance is one of 35 reported missing child cases in Nevada that remained unsolved as of last week, according to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
Although Cabrera’s vanishing remains a mystery, experts say there is always a chance that such cold cases can be resolved.
“The longer a child is missing, it does become more difficult to either solve the case or get them home safely,” said the center’s Rebecca Steinbach. “That chance doesn’t go to zero, though. We see cases all the time where there’s a resolution five, 10, 15 or 20 or more years later.”
Cabrera was 2 when she was reported to have disappeared from her foster parents’ home in the 6500 block of Diamond Point Court in North Las Vegas, near Clayton Street and Camino Eldorado Parkway, on June 10, 2006. She had black hair and brown eyes and was wearing pink shorts, a pink shirt and no shoes.
Her foster parents, Manuel and Vilma Carrascal, told North Las Vegas police the toddler had let herself out of their home sometime during the night, according to previous Las Vegas Review-Journal reporting.
According to court documents, the Carrascals spoke with police during the days after the child’s disappearance but then said they didn’t have anything else to add to the investigation. In a Review-Journal story published three days after Everlyse was reported missing, a North Las Vegas police spokesperson said the foster parents were no longer cooperating with the investigation.
In those early conversations with investigators, according to past Review-Journal reporting, the Carrascals told police that Everlyse must have stood on a stool to reach and unlock a deadbolt on the front door in the middle of the night.
At the time, North Las Vegas police said the foster parents told them that the girl was discovered missing at 8 a.m., and that they called police at about noon. A police spokesperson would not say why the foster parents waited four hours to report the child missing, the Review-Journal reported.
In the days after Cabrera’s disappearance, protesters showed up at the Carrascal home to demand that more be known about her vanishing. Some yelled for the Carrascals to “stop hiding” the toddler.
The girl’s biological parents, Marlena Olivas and Ernesto Cabrera, sued Clark County Family Services and the foster parents in 2006, alleging negligence in supervising and monitoring the child. In court documents, the foster parents denied any wrongdoing.
The biological parents reached a $300,000 insurance settlement with the foster parents, who were later dropped as defendants in the suit. According to the settlement, $250,000 will be paid to Cabrera if she’s found before her 25th birthday in 2029.
If she’s not found by then, the money will go toward a scholarship fund for foster children in Southern Nevada.
Olivas told the Review-Journal in September 2006 that Everlyse liked noodles and hot dogs, and that her favorite cartoons were “Dora the Explorer” and “SpongeBob SquarePants.”
“There has to be some justice,” Olivas said at the time. “There has to be some justice for Everlyse.”
Efforts to reach Carbrera’s foster parents, her biological parents and the North Las Vegas Police Department for comment for this story were unsuccessful.
Hope is not lost
Matt Turner, who runs the public Facebook group “Locks of Reunification,” said it is difficult to solve cases in which there are few witnesses or others willing to come forward.
Turner, who works on missing persons cases in the U.S. and Canada as a hobby, said he remembers learning about the Cabrera case years ago.
“To me that’s the hard part about missing person cases, regardless of how old the missing person is,” Turner said. “Once people stop cooperating, there’s not much law enforcement can do. There’s no physical evidence that a crime took place. I do applaud the North Las Vegas police for everything that they do.”
In 2008, law enforcement in Wisconsin found a girl in a home during a drug arrest in Green Bay, then contacted North Las Vegas police after learning that the girl might be from Nevada and seeing in a national database that Everlyse was missing from Clark County, the Review-Journal previously reported. However, DNA tests proved that the girl was not Everlyse. Authorities in Wisconsin said they believed the girl found there was born to a woman who spent time incarcerated in Nevada.
That development threw Everlyse’s biological parents into emotional turmoil, their attorney said at the time.
In another case, this one involving a slain girl in New York, answers came more than six decades later.
In February, the Elmira Police Department announced the closure of a 1964 case in the murder of 12-year-old Mary Theresa Simpson. The preteen was walking home from a family member’s house when she disappeared. Her body was later found along a logging road.
In that case, police said advances in technology over the years allowed investigators to identify DNA samples recovered from Alfred Murray Jr. of Elmira, who died in 2004. Police said Murray was responsible for the murder.
Steinbach said sometimes people who have been holding secrets for years end up talking as they get nearer to death. She said that could always be a possibility in the Cabrera case.
“It does happen,” Steinbach said. “Deathbed confessions are a real thing. At the end of the day, the person at the center of all this is just a little girl, and she deserves justice and a resolution. When these types of anniversary stories get put out there, people connected to this case know that people are still talking about and looking for her, so maybe it’s time to come forward.”
Or, as Olivas said in 2006: “Somebody has to know something.”
Contact Bryan Horwath at bhorwath@reviewjournal.com. Follow @BryanHorwath on X.
