SPOKANE, Wash. -- Police, enlisting the help of helicopters, volunteers and bloodhounds, raced against snow flurries Saturday in a search for a 6-year-old girl missing since Monday and feared kidnapped.
'We've got the volunteers, and the weather is on our side today,' Sgt. Gene Zeigler said at a command post set up in the eastside Spokane neighborhood.
'We've got to turn up something soon -- before it snows -- or it'll cover up any sign.'
Police fear Tricna Dawn Cloy was kidnapped, and perhaps even murdered, then hidden somewhere in the neighborhood of working-class homes, businesses and wooded parks.
Police also were searching for a former federal convict, Thomas Edward Maupin, 38, for questioning in the child's disappearance.
Maupin was charged Friday with indecent liberties involving another girl, police said.
Tricna's mother, Tina Fraijo, discovered the door to her house broken and her daughter missing early Monday.
Maupin met Fraijo her daughter and 3-year-old son at a party Sunday night and walked them home, police said.
Under gray skies and snow flurries, search and rescue volunteers checked backyards, garages and parks in the area with the help of a helicopter and bloodhounds.
FBI spokesman Joseph Smith in Seattle said Thursday the agency entered the case under the presumption that federal kidnapping statutes were violated.
Police described Maupin as a drifter with an extensive criminal record and believed he came to Spokane from Amite, La. He was convicted in Texas in 1977 of indecency with a child.
Maupin was questioned three times shortly after the child's disappearance. Early Tuesday a friend drove him to Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, where he was last seen.
