Around 9 a.m. on Monday, police in Hampton, Virginia, got a concerning call from a local father.
Cory Bigsby, 43, told police that he’d last seen his 4-year-old son, Codi, asleep around 2 a.m., but that when he’d woken up, the boy was nowhere to be found.
A search in the immediate area quickly began. The FBI teamed up with Hampton police to handle the case of the missing boy, believed to be wearing all-black clothing and Spider-Man flip-flops.
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Authorities said an Amber Alert was not put out as the current parameters of the case did not fit the criteria necessary to do so.
They said they believed Codi wasn’t far from home but that he wasn’t with family members, didn’t appear to have wandered off and didn’t appear to have been abducted.
On Tuesday, Hampton police said Codi’s parents were the people they were “most interested in,” according to WTKR. The parents do not live together but have both been communicating with police.
A day later, police said Cory Bigsby was officially being named a person of interest and that he’d voluntarily remained at police headquarters since initially filing the missing person report, according to WVEC-TV in Hampton.
Hampton Police Chief Mark Talbot told reporters that evidence hasn’t matched stories they’ve received from Codi’s father about when the boy was last seen, WAVY-TV reported.
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As the days have passed without finding the boy, many people’s thoughts have turned to Noah Tomlin, who went missing in the area in June 2019. His body was found a week later at the Hampton Steam Plant.
According to the Hampton Police Facebook page, authorities have been accepting volunteers to help with the official search, though many people and groups have taken it upon themselves to comb through the surrounding neighborhoods.
DAY 3: @HamptonVAPolice plan to hold a press conference at 12. A group of community members are also gathering here at the command center. They say they are organizing alone, but police are accepting their help. #13NewsNow pic.twitter.com/fP0dVlxOT1
— Allison Bazzle 13News Now (@13AllisonBazzle) February 2, 2022
“Back when the Noah Tomlin case happened, when he … first come up missing, they didn’t allow the public to help search,” a local named Richard, who has a grandson Codi’s age, told WTKR-TV in Norfolk.
“I’m not going to let that happen again,” he said. “I’m going to be out here searching.
“I started over here at the church on the other side of the block from this corner where the substation is, walked around the substation, looked up and down the ditch. When I got down there, I started at Salt Ponds, worked my way all the way down, and then went down every, every road back from Salt Ponds to Colonial Acres.”
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Authorities are asking anyone who saw or recorded anything that might be relevant to the case from noon Sunday until Monday morning at 9 a.m. to call 1-800-225-5324.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
