Police step up search for missing son of woman involved in church crash

North Las Vegas police said Saturday that “it’s only a matter of time” before they find the baby boy of a Utah mother who drove through parishioners outside an Evangelical church late Thursday night, apparently in search of a spot to park her car and sleep.

Meanwhile, family members of crash victim Lorenzo Alavez, 54, held vigil in the University Medical Center emergency room late into the night, hoping that he would pull through after undergoing surgery for head injuries. He remained in critical condition.

But they declined to discuss the details of the incident that injured seven other people, on orders from their attorney.

“We’re sorry. We can’t talk about it,” said one of the relatives as Jonathan Alavez, 15, one of the victims, inched his way out the emergency room doors in a black leg brace and walker.

“But God Bless,” she added.

Earlier in the day, police spokesman Tim Bedwell said officers were dealing with “cultural and language barriers” with the Sudanese immigrant parents of Nayakueth D. Tear, 18, who remained in Las Vegas city jail on felony hit-and-run charges. The whereabouts of her 1-year-old son, Janub Tear, was still a mystery.

Bedwell said that if police don’t find the boy soon, then they will launch an investigation.

“Weeks won’t pass. It isn’t going to take weeks,” Bedwell said. “We’re not going to stop until we get a hold of the rabbit. We owe it to the public to resolve this, but we have to rely on a little bit of time and patience from the public before there’s a reasonable suspicion that crosses over into probable cause to conduct an investigation.

“We have to resolve this one way or another.”

Investigators tried to talk to Tear’s parents in West Jordan, a suburb of Salt Lake City, but the Southern Sudan immigrants provided no information — or if they had it, they weren’t forthcoming, Bedwell said.

Up until this point, Tear has been uncooperative and has only told police her son is with his father in Las Vegas, although that could not be confirmed as of late Saturday night.

The boy’s grandmother, however, said her daughter has told her two different stories in different cellphone conversations: one, that the boy was with a friend in Arizona and another, that the boy was sleeping and could not be disturbed when the grandmother wanted to hear his voice.

Bedwell said police can’t put out an Amber Alert on the boy because nobody in the family has officially reported him as abducted and police do not have evidence that a crime has been committed.

Tear’s bond was set at $191,207 after she was booked Friday on eight charges of felony hit-and-run in the 10:57 p.m. crash that occurred in the 1900 block of Losee Road just outside the Iglesia de Cristo church in the vicinity of Lake Mead Boulevard and Interstate 15 as churchgoers were getting out of a three-hour service.

She was later arrested after she fled on foot to where Losee dead-ends. In all, eight victims were struck. Seven have been released from hospitals, with the exception of Alavez.

Tear, who told police she had been living out her car up until the wreck, is expected to make an initial appearance in North Las Vegas Justice Court on Monday morning, Bedwell said.

The brother of the church’s pastor, Jose Llamas, who operates a similar Evangelical ministry in Ontario, Calif., said in a telephone interview Saturday afternoon that parishioners on the scene who escaped injury indicated Tear appeared to be “drunk” or “un drogadicto,” a drug addict.

Police are awaiting the results of a blood test to determine whether she will be charged with driving under the influence.

Tele Lllamas, pastor of the Iglesia de Cristo, could not be reached for comment.

The church, which is fortified with burglar bars and whose Sunday service is listed at 5 p.m., is in a “light industrial area” that’s overrun with homeless people. Bedwell said that “adds to the craziness” on why Tear decided to seek out that particular street to sleep in her car.

Tear is a U.S. citizen along with her six sisters and four brothers. The family was sponsored by the Catholic Community Services, said Margoi Tear, the suspect’s 19-year-old sister, in a telephone interview Saturday.

Margoi Tear said she didn’t think her sister would ever harm the boy, whom she described as a “happy boy” who rarely cried, unless he needed milk in the middle of the night.

“He could say ‘mamma,’ but that was about it,” she said, when asked whether he was capable of speaking.

When asked whether her mother or father were going to try and bail her sister out of jail, she said she didn’t know.

She said her father, Tear Gatluak, 45, was driving a cab Saturday morning and that the mother, Sarah Dak, 39, was “performing charity work” at a Salt Lake City-based Sudanese orphanage for children. She said neither was available for comment.

Margoi Tear also said she never knew her sister to use drugs or drink alcohol, although she did say that her sister had problems with truancy and was even locked up in juvenile detention for skipping junior high school and high school.

“Mostly, she started hanging out with the wrong friends,” she said.

Regarding Thursday’s incident, she commented: “That was crazy, what she did. She must have been high on something.”

Margoi Tear said she last saw her younger sister about two weeks ago, when Nayakueth Tear told the family she was going to Arizona, but she didn’t know how she got there. She told her that the vehicle she was driving at the time of the wreck — a white car, with Utah plates — was not hers.

The Tear family consists of six sisters and four brothers. They live in West Jordan. Only Margoi Tear and her older sister, 22, were born in Southern Sudan while the remainder were born in Utah, she said.

Contact reporter Tom Ragan at tragan@reviewjournal.com or 702-224-5512.