Baby Lisa Irwin Missing: Neighbor Says Handyman 'Shady'
Neighbor of missing Baby Lisa Irwin’s parents, Mary Hurt, spoke out Monday concerning the child’s disappearance, which now enters its fifth week with no significant leads.
“Our neighbor told us that the night that baby went missing, the man who was seen coming up the street came and went on our property and through our next door neighbor’s gate,” Hurt told CNN’s Nancy Grace, in reference to Jersey, a handyman in the Irwin’s residential neighborhood.
Hurt described Jersey as “shady.”
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Police have not confirmed Jersey as a suspect. The handyman is currently behind bars for an unrelated burglary charge.
The case has taken a series of abrupt turns in the past week. Kansas City based lawyer Cyndy Short bowed out from the case Friday.
In a press conference held Monday, Short announced that she and New York based lawyer Joe Tacopina, also representing Deborah Bradley and Jeremy Irwin, could not work together as a team.
“Our goals and our approaches are so different that one of us had to go,” she said.
Thursday evening, Tacopina announced the cancellation of the interviews set up for baby Lisa’s two half brothers, ages five and eight, which were originally scheduled for Friday, Oct. 28.
Both boys originally told authorities they heard a noise on the night of Lisa’s disappearance, Oct. 4, and authorities are seeking to re-interview the two children for further information. DNA samples will also be taken from the boys’ cheeks to compare with the DNA found in the house.
Kansas City Police Office Darin Snapp told ABCNews.com that he wanted to re-interview the brothers to “see if they remember anything that might be able to help find their younger sister.”
Tacopina stated he would reschedule the interviews for some time this week.
Along with interviews and DNA samples from the two half brothers, Investigators are requesting that the parents of Lisa Irwin partake in separate interviews concerning their daughter’s disappearance. The two parents told authorities that their 10-month-old baby girl was snatched from her crib in Kansas City, Missouri on Oct. 4.
"There's a whole list of things that they may know," Kansas City Police Captain Steve Young told ABCNews.com.
Although officials contended that the couple has complied with authorities’ requests, public suspicion began to circulate when Deborah Bradley, mother of Lisa, switched the time she last saw her infant the night she disappeared. Originally saying she put her child down at 10:30 p.m., she then changed her story to say 6:40 p.m. local time.
More concern arose when Bradley told NBC news that she had been drinking heavily on the evening of her child’s disappearance, saying that she had “enough to be drunk.” Bradley has said she fears being arrested for her baby’s disappearance, because “if they arrest me, people are going to stop looking for her.”
Bradley's fiancé and baby Lisa's father Jeremy Irwin was out on a late call doing electrical work for a local Starbucks. When he returned from work roughly around 4 a.m., he reported several lights on, the front door unlocked, three missing cell phones and a tampered screen window.
On Monday, Oct. 24, footage from a gas station surveillance camera surfaced, showing a man in white exiting a wooded area close to the Bradley home, roughly two hours before Baby Lisa was reported missing on Oct. 4.
Investigators are still developing their leads concerning the surveillance video footage, but as of now, investigators have not confirmed any official suspects in the Baby Lisa mystery.
