FLOYD, Iowa – The search for a missing 5-year-old girl was to resume Tuesday as officials launched a criminal investigation into the child's disappearance.
Evelyn Celeste Miller (search) was last seen at about 2 a.m. Friday, asleep on a love seat in the family's apartment, Floyd County Sheriff Rick Lynch said.
Lynch said there were no "primary suspects" in the case. A statement from the sheriff's office Monday said a search warrant was issued at a nearby Charles City address.
Authorities spent three hours executing the search, leaving the residence with three brown paper bags and one black trash bag containing unknown items.
"Items crucial to gaining knowledge on the events that happened to Evelyn would be forwarded to the labs for immediate analysis," Floyd County (search) Attorney Marilyn Dettmer said Monday.
Sheriff's officials said three people live at the Charles City residence, including two friends of Casey Fredericksen, the fiance of Evelyn Miller's mother, Noel.
Noel Miller has said two of her fiance's friends were at her apartment the night the girl disappeared, but she declined to name them. Authorities wouldn't say whether the apartment that was searched belonged to the same people.
Authorities have said that Fredericksen, 26, passed a lie-detector test after he was questioned for about four hours.
Miller has said she left her children including Evelyn, Gabriel, 2, and Damian, 1, with her fiance at their apartment in this small farming community about 110 miles northeast of Des Moines.
When she arrived home from her overnight job later Friday morning, the apartment door was slightly open and Evelyn was gone.
"She wasn't a kid that would just get up in the middle of the night and walk out at three or four or five in the morning," she told KCCI television. "She is a very bright girl and we just want her home and safe."
The family has said they suspect the girl may have been abducted.
Brandi Hoffman, a family spokeswoman, appealed to a possible abductor at a press conference over the weekend.
"If there is somebody out there who has her, please bring her back to her family," Hoffman said.
A nationwide Amber Alert (search), which uses electronic traffic signs and other means to dispense information that would include a description of the missing child, had not been issued because there was no known suspect or vehicle description to release, Lynch said.
"We still don't have the criteria" to trigger the national notification system, he said.
While investigators pursued a criminal investigation into Evelyn's disappearance, search efforts continued to expand outward from girl's apartment complex.
Lynch said that over 200 volunteers searched ditches, bridges, waterways and fields for traces of the child on Monday.
Volunteers were needed, he said, to resume search efforts on Tuesday.
Evelyn Miller was described as a white girl about 3 feet, 5 inches tall, weighing around 40 pounds. She has blond hair, hazel eyes and a missing bottom tooth. She was last seen wearing a blue shirt with flowers on the left side and light blue shorts with flowers.
The FBI and Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation were involved in the investigation.
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