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CNN Live At Daybreak

Chicago Police Still Search for Missing Sisters

Aired August 20, 2002 - 05:06   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: Just below the headlines of the latest missing child stories is the case of two Chicago sisters. They've been missing now for more than a year. Police continue to place a priority on the case.
But as CNN's Jeff Flock reports, their extensive efforts have led to few results.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JEFF FLOCK, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): On a wall a giant time line tracks the hours before and after they disappeared. Aerial photographs map their apartment and the school where they were headed. More than 900 police reports fill blue binders and spill into boxes in an entire room at the Chicago police headquarters devoted to the case of now 4-year-old Diamond and 11-year-old Tionda Bradley, missing without a trace for over a year.

LT. DALIA PADGURSKIS, CHICAGO POLICE: It's become one of the largest cases in volume that the Chicago Police Department has had.

FLOCK: Lieutenant Dalia Padgurskis, sensitive to criticism that missing inner city black children don't get the attention white suburban ones do, eagerly documents police efforts.

DALIA: It becomes like an obsession, if I could say that.

FLOCK: But a failed one so far. July 6, 2001, Tracey Bradley leaves her daughters home alone while she goes to work. She returns to find a note saying they were headed for this school. They never made it.

TRACEY BRADLEY, MOTHER OF MISSING GIRLS: I'm just wishing my kids, whoever out there got my kids please return my kids home.

FLOCK: Police treat it as a stranger abduction and search frantically, combining dense forest preserves, poking through the underbrush on the shore of a lake, questioning family members, including the fathers of the two girls.

"America's Most Wanted" runs their pictures. Nothing.

UNIDENTIFIED PARISHIONERS: Amen.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Diamond and Tionda.

FLOCK: Fast forward a year. Monthly vigils are still held for the girls. Now three full-time investigator work the case and hot line calls have trickled to two or three a week.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Investigators are preparing for the worst...

FLOCK: Once the lead story on the local news, coverage has faded, too. The only thing that hasn't changed, the answer to the question I put to the Chicago police chief of detectives.

(on camera): Do you have any suspects in the case?

CHIEF PHILIP CLINE, CHICAGO POLICE: Well, we have a lot of people we're looking at, but no one I can call directly a suspect.

FLOCK: (voice-over) As hope fades, neighborhood kids leave messages outside the girls' apartment. Their older sister Rita writes simply, "I hope Tionda and Diamond come back home."

I'm Jeff Flock, CNN, in Chicago.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

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