The highly publicized search for the Tempe baby who went missing in December has hit a roadblock, but a babysitter, who may be one of the last people to see the child alive, is describing her time with the 8-month-old to San Antonio news outlets.
From everything that has been reported, remaining hope of finding the kid alive is bleak.
Analisa Urias, a babysitter in San Antonio, Texas, where Gabriel Johnson reportedly was last seen alive, says she was alarmed by the instructions she was given by the baby's mother, 23-year-old Elizabeth Johnson, who is now in custody in Arizona.
Urias says she answered a Craigslist ad for a babysitter, which took her to the Homegate Studios and Suites, the hotel in San Antonio where Johnson was staying with the baby while on the run. She says the hotel was dirty, and there was a large butcher's knife on the nightstand next to the bed.
When Urias asked what she would need to do for the baby, she says Johnson "told me that she had already drugged him up with medicine, but that if he started crying, just to give him some more to shut up," according to WOAI 4 in San Antonio.
"I was trying to play with him, to make him happy while I was there, but everything I was doing didn't seem to work," she continues. "He wouldn't cry, but just had this sad look on his face."
Johnson, according to Urias, was agitated before she left and was dressed like she was going to a party. When she returned about two hours later, Urias says she seemed much more relaxed. She said she did not know where the woman had gone that night.
Johnson lost custody of the baby when she failed to show up for a custody hearing in December. She went missing with the baby that same day and was arrested in Florida -- sans her eight-month-old kid -- on December 30.
While on the run, Johnson sent text-messages to the father, Logan McQueary, suggesting that she had killed the baby, but when she was caught by police, she claimed she had given the baby to a couple in a park in San Antonio.
At first glance, Johnson's story sounded like bullshit and screamed of the Caley Anthony case in Florida a few years ago. Given Johnson's unwillingness to give police any information other than a farfetched story about giving the baby to two strangers she bumped into in a park in a city she in which she didn't live, the parralels to the Anthony case seemed hard to ignore.
However, last week, Tempe police told New Times that they thought the tale had some merit and believed the baby could still be alive, although they wouldn't tell us why.
This week, authorities seem to have changed their tune and say odds of finding the baby alive are increasingly unlikely. Leads in the case have dried up, and photos have emerged of the baby looking sickly and holding a prescription pill bottle.
Johnson is being held in Maricopa County on kidnapping and child-abuse charges. Anyone with information regarding the whereabouts of 8-month-old Gabriel Johnson are encouraged to call Tempe police or the FBI.
