Voices for Justice is a podcast that uses adult language and discusses sensitive and potentially triggering topics, including violence, abuse, and murder.

This podcast may not be appropriate for younger audiences.

All parties are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

Some names have been changed or omitted per their request or for safety

purposes. Listener discretion is advised. My name is Sarah Turney, and this is Voices for Justice. Today, I am

discussing the case of five-year-old Dulce Maria Alavez, who went missing in a park in Bridgeton, New Jersey

in 2019.

This story was brought to my attention by several people who follow me on social media.

And although it's still a pretty new case, I was really surprised to find that Dolce

hasn't received more coverage.

So I wanted to bring attention to it here,

because it really is a crazy case. There are conflicting witness statements, anonymous letters that

pushed a family advocate to stop working on the case, and a lot of theories about what happened to

Dulce. But let's get into it. Dulce-Aves was born on April 25th,

2014 in Bridgeton, New Jersey, to her mother, Noema Alaves-Perez, and her father Edgar Perez.

Now, Bridgeton itself is actually a pretty small, rural city of about 25,000 people with a large population of Mexican immigrants, many of which came to work the vast amounts of farmland decades ago.

Dolce was only five years old when she went missing, but she is an adorable little girl, and by all accounts, a happy kid

who just started kindergarten, loved the movie Frozen, and dressing up like Elsa, and she was always

begging her older cousins to show her YouTube videos of Peppa Pig. Let's talk about the family

dynamic. Dolce's mom, Noemma, was a very young mother,

giving birth to Dulce when she was only 14 years old. And Dolce's father, Edgar, wasn't really

in their lives. According to Noemma, he questioned whether or not Dolce was even his until she began to

...