A year has passed since 6-year-old Noel was reported missing in Everman. ‘It’s shocking’

One year ago Sunday, police in Everman announced a 6-year-old boy was missing. A Texas Amber Alert was issued, police began scouring the property where his family lived and they determined that the boy’s mother and stepfather fled the country with his siblings on a flight to Istanbul, Turkey, to connect to India.

Noel Rodriguez-Alvarez hasn’t been seen since the fall of 2022, but he wasn’t reported missing until March 2023.

Police launched a massive search for Noel, calling in support from other local departments, the state and even federal authorities. They followed leads given to them, from reports that Noel was in Mexico with his biological father to a claim that his mother, Cindy Rodriguez-Singh, had sold him outside a grocery store. None of them appear to be true.

In reality, Noel is dead, police say. They suspect he was killed by his mother.

His body has not been found.

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Noel is remembered by people like a temporary foster mother, Patricia Paris, as a sweet, fun, playful child who was quick to love. Paris said she thought of Noel as her own child, an affectionate boy who would happily play with other kids in her house.

Noel had developmental and physical disabilities and required special care and close attention. Police painted a picture of Rodriguez-Singh as an abusive parent who would deprive Noel of food and water because she didn’t like changing his diaper. At least once she hit him with a set of keys because he drank water, police said. She called him evil and a demon and said he wanted to harm her twin daughters, born just before Noel went missing, police said.

Police have issued a warrant for Rodriguez-Singh’s arrest, charging her with murder. Because police believe she is still in India, authorities have to wait for the Indian government to extradite her back to the United States.

The investigation

Police began investigating Noel’s whereabouts on March 24, 2023, after a concerned relative from out of town contacted authorities. Rodriguez-Singh spun stories for investigators, police said, telling them that Noel had gone to live with a relative. Other people told detectives that Rodriguez-Singh claimed she sold her son outside a supermarket.

The last time police can say he was seen alive was in late 2022. While Everman Police Chief Craig Spencer said Noel had been missing too long for an Amber Alert under normal circumstances, he said his department determined there was nothing normal about his disappearance and the alert was sent out.

But just before it was issued, police said, Rodriguez-Singh and Noel’s stepfather, Arshdeep Singh, fled the country in an escape that may have been planned months before. They boarded a flight to Istanbul, then transferred to a connecting flight to India, Singh’s home country.

Investigators were initially hopeful Noel was still alive. They spoke with his father, who was in Mexico and who Rodriguez-Singh said he’d been sent to live with, but were able to disprove that Noel had been to Mexico. They checked with other family members, but none of them had seen Noel. Investigators even followed up on the story that Noel’s mother had sold him. They determined that, too, was a fabrication.

They searched the house and property of Charles Parson, an elderly man in Everman who told the Star-Telegram he welcomed Noel’s family into his home after he found Rodriguez-Singh sleeping in her car in his neighborhood. He provided them a bedroom and helped them in any way he could. Parson told investigators the last time he’d seen Noel was sometime in late 2022. He though the 6-year-old was living with other family.

Parson has been cooperating with police in the investigation.

In November 2023, police made the determination that Noel is dead. Spencer said at the time that the presumption of his death was the last thing any investigators wanted to do. They exhausted every other option, he said, and there just wasn’t any way police could reasonably assume he was alive any longer.

Noel’s disappearance went so long without being reported because he was kept relatively isolated. He was homeschooled, so there were no teachers or school staff to raise alarms about absences. The people who saw him regularly trusted his mother, so they believed her when she told them he was living with other family members.

Noel’s body may have been inside a shed that was removed from a spot where contractors built a concrete patio paid for by Rodriguez-Singh in early 2023, police said. A large carpet that was thrown away hours before the family fled the country had served as the floor of that shed. Dogs also smelled traces of human remains on the carpet, which police recovered from a dumpster, according to Spencer. Rodriguez-Singh changed the specifications for the deck several times, he said.

Rodriguez-Singh planned the family’s escape to India in fall 2022, police said. Noel may have already been dead by that point, according to investigators.

‘Lived in squalor’

Shortly after he and Rodriguez-Singh were married, Singh purchased a large shed to put in the back yard of Parson’s home.

The family “lived in squalor,” Spencer said at an April 25, 2023, news conference.

Parson’s modest home is clean and comfortable, if a little cluttered. The shed Parson said Singh bought to expand the family’s living space was not.

The Star-Telegram was able to see the inside of the shed and found it with belongings piled up. It was a single room with curtains to divide it and had electricity and air-conditioning but no plumbing. Parson said he kept the backdoor of his home unlocked so those staying in the shed could get inside to use the restroom, bathe and get water.

Parson told the Star-Telegram he couldn’t tell anything was wrong. Singh would spoil the children, he said, constantly buying them clothes, toys and even a trampoline.

Rodriguez-Singh did at one point lose custody of her children, leading to Noel’s placement as a foster child with Paris. She was his foster parent from 2020 to 2021. Rodriguez-Singh had lost custody of her children after she was convicted of driving while intoxicated with her kids in the car in 2020 and received 10 years of probation, according to Tarrant County court records.

Noel’s mother and stepfather

According to public records, Rodriguez-Singh graduated high school in Fort Worth in 2003. Property records indicate she’d lived in Tarrant County since her high school graduation.

Rodriguez-Singh had 10 children in total. The oldest three lived with her mother, their grandmother.

Parson told the Star-Telegram that Rodriguez-Singh would help him out around the house, shopping for groceries and cooking and cleaning. She was always kind to him. He did notice she became less interested in Noel when she was pregnant with her twin daughters, but that he’d never witnessed anything to make him concerned for the boy’s safety.

The abuse of Noel happened out of his presence, he said.

He told the Star-Telegram that Singh appeared to love the children as his own. He was patient, affectionate and parental with them. The description Parson gave was not that of a man police said may have had a role in hiding Noel’s death.

And that wasn’t how Singh’s former employer described him, either.

His employer, Mohammed Khan, told the Star-Telegram that Singh was hired about two and a half years before the family left the country and he managed purchasing merchandise for convenience stores and helped with banking. Like Parson, Khan never would have imagined Singh would be involved in anything criminal. He described Singh as a happy person, and a hard worker who would do anything he could to help the business succeed.

“It’s shocking,” Khan said. “I still feel like it’s a Hollywood movie or a bad dream.”

Khan said the actions of Singh, who police have accused of stealing money from the Azle Food Mart location of the business and then falsifying records to cover his tracks, left his employees in shock.

Singh was born in India. It’s unclear exactly when he moved to the U.S.

Cindy and Arshdeep were married around 2021, then the shed was built.

This article contains information from the Star-Telegram’s archives.