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Noel Rodriguez-Alvarez, on the left, and Cindy Rodriguez-Singh, on the right. (Texas Department of Public Safety)
The mother of a long-missing and presumed dead 6-year-old disabled Texas boy has been indicted for capital murder in Tarrant County.
Noel Rodriguez-Alvarez was last seen alive in October 2022.
Since November 2022, various witnesses have relayed various versions of stories allegedly told by the boy’s mother purporting to account for his whereabouts. In March, his entire family fled to India.
Cindy Rodriguez-Singh also stands accused of two counts of injury to a child and one count of abandoning a child without intent to return. The indictment was handed up on Oct. 30 and hailed by local law enforcement as a “tremendous milestone” in the case.
“These indictments will significantly support our effort to apprehend and extradite Cindy back to the United States,” Everman Police Chief Craig Spencer said during a Monday press conference. “Teams are already working with the U.S. Marshals Office on that effort.”
Law enforcement previously learned that Rodriguez-Singh boarded an international flight bound for India two days before an Amber Alert was issued about Noel’s disappearance. Also on that flight were the defendant’s six other children, and husband, Arshdeep Singh.
Theories that supported the notion the boy was still alive, however, were quickly replaced by the conviction that he had died – somehow – at the hands of his own mother. To date, Noel’s body has yet to be found. Overall, physical evidence in the case been relatively sparse.
Spencer addressed that issue in discussing the nature of the indictments and murder warrant issued for Rodriguez-Singh.
“When this case was presented to the grand jury, it was indicted in what is called a ‘manner and means unknown to the grand jury’ – that’s what they indicted on,” the police chief said in response to question about cadaver dogs. “And when you indict on that, essentially what we have to prove – we may not have a body and well, we don’t have a body, right – but we have to prove a reasonable effort in identifying any and all other circumstances or potential outcomes for this boy.”
Over the last six months, a multi-agency, multi-jurisdictional law enforcement had been working to find support for anything other than Noel being dead, Spencer said. All of those were ruled out.
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“Leaving us down to one simple conclusion: he was murdered,” the police chief said.
Noel suffered from a host of ailments that required attention and patience. He had not been seen for months by extended family at the time law enforcement became involved. When initially contacted by police about her vanished son, Rodriguez-Singh said the child had been living with his biological father in Mexico since November 2022. Detectives later learned that was not true; the boy’s father had been deported before he ever had a chance to meet his son.
Since the Rodriguez-Singh family’s rushed flight out of the country, a steady drip of sad and troubling developments seemingly confirmed the community’s worst-held fears in Everman, a small town some 11 miles south of Fort Worth and part of the broader Metroplex region.
In early April, a search warrant alleged that Noel’s mother told his grandmother she had sold him to another woman at a Fiesta Market – a chain of Latin-American grocery stores prevalent throughout North Texas. In a press conference announcing that warrant, Spencer said the boy’s mother had, in the days leading up to his death, described the 6-year-old as “evil, possessed, or having a demon in him.”
Later in April, police revealed that the boy’s mother paid for a new concrete patio to be poured in the backyard of a home she didn’t own – just weeks before fleeing to India. Cadaver dogs signaled the presence of human remains on the soil directly underneath the patio. Dogs also alerted to the carpet previously used as the floor of a makeshift shed that once sat in the exact same place as the patio – carpet that was previously disposed of in a nearby dumpster by Arshdeep Singh. But no “forensic evidence” was found at the home.
Days after that, police alleged that Cindy Rodriguez-Singh worshipped and idolized a cult-like folk saint who personifies death and is popularly thought to favor the activities of violent drug cartels – and cited those claims as “very important” to the case of the missing boy.
In late April, the boy’s stepfather was charged with one count of felony theft for allegedly stealing $10,000 funds from an employer on March 22 – the same day he left the United States on a Turkish Airways flight.
Although it’s been more or less clear to law enforcement for months that Rodriguez-Singh is behind the boy’s disappearance, grand jurors only formalized those suspicions this week.
“The last thing I want is to have a 6-year-old boy die at the hands of his mother,” Spencer said. “That’s not what I want, but that’s the facts that we’re faced with here and that’s what we’re looking at.”
The police chief said the indictments should help speed up the extradition process at the federal level and that, in turn, should help with the international search for Noel’s mother and stepfather.
“Not a day goes by that someone doesn’t ask about Noel or the missing little boy from Everman,” Everman Mayor Ray Richardson said at the Monday press conference. “No child should ever have to go through the abuse and neglect that Noel went through. Now that the murder warrant has been issued, we will hopefully be able to get the answers to many unanswered that surround this case. The goal is and always has been to locate Noel and give him the justice he deserves.”
