There has been a significant development in the case of a 6-year-old boy’s disappearance last year from Everman, Texas.
An indictment against Cindy Rodriguez-Singh, the mother of Noel Rodriguez-Alvarez, was handed down by a Tarrant County grand jury on October 30. She has been charged with capital murder, two counts of injury to a child, and one count of abandoning without intent to return.
Chief Craig Spencer from the Everman Police Department, which has been investigating the young child’s presumed murder, explained during a press conference that he hopes that the indictment will lead to the extradition of Rodriguez-Singh from India and will inject some momentum into the case that has weighed heavily on the community.
“Not a day goes by where someone doesn’t ask about Noel or the missing little boy from Everman,” explained Everman Mayor Ray Richardson, according to CBS Texas.
The city named a new playground at Clyde Pittman Park in Noel’s honor this past May, as reported in The Dallas Express.
As previously covered in The Dallas Express, the local authorities learned in March that the information provided by Rodriguez-Singh about her son during a wellness check was false.
She had allegedly reported that Rodriguez-Alvarez had been living with his biological father in Mexico since November 2022, yet this was later disproven. Rodriguez-Alvarez’s father had never met his son, having been deported from the U.S. prior to his birth.
An Amber Alert was issued, and Rodriguez-Singh, who has an extensive criminal history involving alcohol-related offenses, allegedly fled the country with her husband Arshdeep Singh. Singh reportedly purchased one-way tickets for Rodriguez-Singh and their children to India using a credit card and then allegedly altered his workplace’s records to steal $10,000 shortly before the flight departed.
With these happenings, the authorities began investigating Rodriguez-Alvarez’s case as a death investigation.
Rodriguez-Alvarez was a fragile child who had been born prematurely, leaving him with a number of disabilities and chronic lung disease.
Speaking to CBS, Patricia Paris, a woman who once fostered Rodriguez-Alvarez and his siblings before they were returned to Rodriguez-Singh’s custody in late 2021, described him as a “sweet boy” who loved to give hugs and always had a smile on his face.
“I remember my husband telling her if she feels like she’s overwhelmed, if she needed a break, just call us. We would come get him, we would take care of him,” Paris said.
Although Rodriguez-Alvarez’s body has not been recovered, Spencer explained during the press conference that Everman PD and other agencies had ruled out any possibility that the young boy was still alive.
“The last thing I want is to have a 6-year-old boy die at the hands of his mother. 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,” Spencer said.
Now that an arrest warrant for Rodriguez-Singh for capital murder has been issued, the extradition process is expected to quicken.
Recent crimes committed against children in North Texas have ranged from sexual assault to fentanyl poisoning.
In Dallas, these incidents tack on to the growing rates of crime seen citywide.
Although the Dallas Police Department has launched a campaign against violent crime, murders remain frequent, with 211 recorded since the start of the year as of October 31, according to the city’s crime analytics dashboard. This entails a nearly 13% increase over the same period year over year.
An ongoing officer shortage has dampened efforts to curb crime, with DPD employing fewer than 3,200 sworn-in personnel at this time. This runs short of the 4,000 officers cited as ideal for maintaining public safety in a previous estimate by the City of Dallas.
