Local Reactions to Baby Grace
By: Lauren Murphy
Updated: November 26, 2007
The child we know as Baby Grace has been tentatively identified as Riley Ann Sawyers.
Kimberly Dawn Trenor, the child's mother, and her husband Royce Clyde Zeigler are in jail charged with injury to a child and tampering with evidence.
That tragic tale holds some parallels to a mystery here in Lubbock.
"We have the skeletal remains of a child. If that child was here for any length of time someone would think 'okay they left town' or 'where is that child?'" said Major Don Carter of the Lubbock Sheriff's Department.
Nobody came forward, and two years and no leads later, the young boy is still unknown.
But how could a child vanish without a friend, a neighbor, or anyone else asking why.
"You have a lot of families that are very close and they don't socialize much. Children of those families would be harder to detect," said Carter.
"If you have families that move around it would be hard to tell if something happened with those families."
He also said some things are just different these days.
"We don't have enough of what went on when we were growing up. People don't even know who their neighbors are."
In the Sawyers case, police believe the mother and stepfather were involved.
Carter says that is a possibility in the this case as well.
"Logically they would report it right away, unless they were involved."
