Police seek help in search for abducted 3-year-old girl

By Rich Coleman

Monday, May 9, 2011 | 5:29 p.m.

North Las Vegas Police are asking for the public’s help in finding a 3-year-old girl abducted from her foster home Sunday evening.

Carla Espinosa-Alvarez lives with her foster family in the 100 block of Rosa Rosales Court near Commerce Street and West Lone Mountain Road.

According to her foster mother, at about 9:30 p.m. Sunday, a masked man and woman knocked at the front door of the home. After being tricked into opening the front door, the foster mother was held at gunpoint by a man while the woman searched the home “specifically” for Espinosa-Alvarez, police said.

She found the child upstairs, police said, and carried her out of the house.

Both the man and woman were described as Hispanic, about 5-feet-6-inches tall with black hair and brown eyes. They were dressed in all black with brown masks or bandanas over their faces. They both spoke fluent Spanish, police said.

Espinosa-Alvarez is described as Hispanic, 3-feet-2-inches tall and 50 pounds with dark brown hair and brown eyes. Four of her front teeth are silver-capped and visible when she smiles, police said. She was last seen wearing a pink short-sleeved pajama shirt and pink pajama pants.

Detectives want to speak to Espinosa-Alvarez’s biological mother, a 30-year-old Mexican national who is believed to live in Mexico and has made threats to take her out of the foster home, where she’s lived for the past seven months.

Witnesses told police they saw a suspicious white luxury sedan with dark tinted windows in the area just before the kidnapping.

Anyone with information regarding the girl's abduction, the suspicious vehicle or the whereabouts of Espinosa-Alvarez is being urged to contact the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children at 1-800-THE-LOST. Police said the case doesn't meet the criteria for an Amber Alert.