DETROIT, MI -- It's an unresolved mystery.
Detroit police, hours after saying evidence in the case of missing 12-year-old Charlie Bothuell V suggested he might be the victim of homicide, found the boy hidden behind boxes and a 50-gallon barrel in his father's basement, Detroit Police Officer Adama Madera said Wednesday evening.
Charlie's father, 45-year-old Charlie Bothuell V, reported his son missing on June 14. The boy "was working out when he stopped to go to the bathroom and never came back," the father told Detroit police.
"The police and the FBI have been through that house probably about six times since the beginning ... so we know at various points he wasn't there," said Detroit-based attorney Mark Magidson, who is representing the father and stepmother. "They brought dogs in there and they brought bloodhound dogs in there and they couldn't find him, but they found him today.
"We believe that he was in the neighborhood all along and he returned today and police apparently got wind of that ... If he had been there he couldn't have hidden that well."
Detroit police say the investigation is ongoing.
"Whether or not he was there the entire time remains to be seen," said Madera.
He said it did not appear the boy intentionally blockaded himself and when police discovered him he was "kind of cradled" lying on the ground.
The father, who arrived on scene in a suit and was seen hugging a detective, declined to speak to media as he left with another man in a silver Honda CRV, but said he planned to speak publicly Thursday morning.
Magidson said police wouldn't reveal where Charlie had been taken. Several investigators remained inside the family's town house as of 6 p.m.
The boy disappeared from his father's Mies Van Der Rohe-designed townhouse in sought after Lafayette Park to the east of downtown Detroit across Interstate 75.
A neighbor providing MLive a tour of her town house, the same layout as the Bothuell's, displayed how the units have external access through a communal hallway that runs behind the basements of each adjoining unit. There is a door at either end protected by a lock and alarm system.
The neighbor, who asked not to be named, said each basement comes with a storage closet. Some are accessed from the interior of the unit's basement, others through doors on the outside in the communal hall.
"We're not ruling this out being a homicide," Craig said at 2 p.m. Wednesday prior to the boy's discovery. But "we cannot definitively say it is a homicide ... We're treating it as a serious missing."
He said evidence, both physical and circumstantial suggested, "this is beyond or could be beyond that of a serious missing," but declined to elaborate on the evidence.
Both parents were asked to submit to polygraph tests. The father submitted to a test performed by the FBI with the results proving inconclusive; the stepmother refused, Craig said.
Bothuell IV tells MLive the FBI never requested his wife take a polygraph test.
Bouthell said he had a falling out with Detroit police after a lieutenant asked him to come to the headquarters for questioning. Bothuell said he was told the interrogation would take about an hour, but he and his wife were at the station from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. the following morning, then asked to return again at 11 a.m.
Bothuell, a registered nurse who operates an injury claims case manager business, called the treatment "terrible" and "unwarranted conduct." He refused to return for further questioning but has remained cooperative with FBI investigators, he and his attorney say.
"DPD asked both me and my wife to do a lie detector test and we told them, 'No, not a chance in the world after what you've done," Bothuell said, adding that he agreed later the same day to a test conducted by the FBI. "He literally destroyed any trust" between me an the police department.
Bothuell says his son disappeared once before about two years ago but was located by police within three hours about a block from his mother's house, where the boy sometimes resides for weekends or even weeks at a time.
A woman claimed to have seen Charlie walking along Lafayette near the crime-riddled Martin Luther King Apartments on the night of June 14 and headed in the direction of his mother's home about two miles away, said Bothuell.
Bothuell, a father of four, appeared on the nationally broadcast "Nancy Grace Show" on HLN TV Tuesday night and said he expected to make a second appearance Wednesday, this before his son was located.
There have been no arrests in the case.
Posted By: Siebra Muhammad
Friday, June 27th 2014 at 10:26AM
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