More than three years after the disappearance of a Delaware County mother of two, police searched the basement of her estranged husband’s former home.
On Tuesday police dug up the basement of a home on the 400 block of Lafayette Avenue in Collingdale, Pennsylvania in search of Melissa Rodriguez, who has been missing since April 19, 2013.
Collingdale Police were unable to get into the house for years until a bank foreclosure was recently finalized. They received permission from the bank that owns the home to go into the property and do a follow up investigation. After the cadaver dogs they brought in indicated a positive hit, they activated a search and rescue team Tuesday. The officers dug in the basement floor and searched the back walls but found nothing.
"It's frustrating because she was there," Collingdale Police Chief Robert Adams told NBC10. "She was there at some point. I can't explain why four different search and rescue dogs aggressively alerted to the same exact spot in the basement. We dug down through a six-inch cement slab and 12 to 18 inches of dirt and clay in the floor to find nothing."
In April of 2013, Rodriguez’s husband told police she went missing after leaving the Lafayette Avenue home to visit her friends in Newark, New Jersey. Her husband said he sent her a text message after not hearing from her all weekend but never received a response.
"I ended up taking the kids to school on Monday," said her husband, who also admitted he and his wife were in the process of separating. "She was going to pick them up and she didn't pick them up. The school called because they hadn't heard from her."
Rodriguez, who was 30 when she went missing, also never showed up to the new job that she was supposed to start only a few days after her disappearance. Police contacted her friends in Newark, New Jersey who she was supposed to meet up with. The friends told police they spoke to Melissa on Thursday, April 18, 2013, around noon and she told them she would be staying at their house for the weekend. They expected another phone call from her the next day but never heard from her.
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Rodriguez’s car was also still parked at the Lafayette Avenue home. In June of 2013, some of her neighbors contacted police and told them they recalled her husband "acting suspiciously" in the backyard of the house. Police searched the husband's work truck and brought cadaver dogs and diggers to search for evidence at the home but found nothing.
After reporting his wife missing, the husband retained criminal defense attorney Michael Diamondstein as his lawyer and reportedly moved to New Jersey with the couple's children.
Rodriguez stands 5-foot-4-inches tall and weighs around 130 pounds with brown hair and brown eyes. She was last seen wearing a yellow flowered dress and glasses. If you have any information on her disappearance, please call Collingdale Police at 610-586-0502.
