Tuesday, Sept. 16 marks six years since a little girl went missing at a South Jersey playground.
Now, investigators say they are using new technology to try to solve the case of Dulce Maria Alavez’s disappearance.
Since Dulce went missing in 2019, investigators say they have gotten hundreds of tips.
Federal, state and local authorities have developed their own leads, but Dulce remains missing.
Now, six years later, New Jersey State Police are putting new investigators on the case and new tools.
Dulce Maria Alavez disappears from NJ park
Dulce and her family had gone to a gas station to get ice cream bars before heading to Bridgeton City Park.
It was there that Dulce’s mom, Noema Alavez, says that she let her 5-year-old daughter and 3-year-old son play while she stayed in the car to scratch off a lottery ticket.
When she went to check on the kids, Dulce was gone and she hasn’t been found since.
Tuesday marks six years since that day.
Today, Dulce would be 11 years old.
Investigation gets new eyes in effort to find Dulce
The Cumberland County Prosecutor’s Office, which is the lead agency investigating the case, issues a statement saying that new investigators are reviewing the evidence.
The prosecutor also said that the State Police have begun processing the files through artificial intelligence.
“This would help potentially. Narrowing down interesting and relevant pieces of evidence on one hand and also establish connections that humans may or may not notice,” Franz Kurfess, a professor of computer science and software engineering at California Polytechnic State University, explained.
Kurfess has been working on developing AI technology to help in active search and rescue missions.
“It’s just not humanly possible to keep track of all of the documents and all of information in the documents. And computers can significantly help with that,” he said.
He said that law enforcement looking into Dulce’s case could benefit from AI but he cautions that it’s not just for scanning case files into a system.
“You have to know how to prompt the system and you also have to carefully look for clues that something is made up or that something isn’t reliable,” he explained.
Dulce’s mom said that she is hopeful the advancements in technology will bring her daughter home.
There is a $75,000 reward for information in Dulce’s case.
Law enforcement is asking that anyone who was at Bridgeton City Park on Sept. 16, 2019 to upload any pictures they have from that day to the FBI page on Dulce Maria Alavez.
For a deeper dive into the case of Dulce Maria Alavez and her disappearance, check out NBC10’s “Somebody Knows Something: The Disappearance of Dulce.”
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