Lisa Irwin‘s memory is still ever-present in the north Kansas City, Missouri, home from which she disappeared more than five years ago as a 10-month-old toddler. This past Halloween her mom, Deborah Bradley, bought Lisa an Elsa costume from the Disney movie Frozen. For Lisa’s last birthday — she would have turned 6 on Nov. 11 — Deborah and Lisa’s father, Jeremy Irwin, planned to buy her a necklace bearing Lisa’s topaz birthstone. Those presents testify to the parents’ unshakable belief that their daughter was abducted but survives and is waiting to be found and reunited with her family. Indeed, wrapped gifts fill Lisa’s unchanged bedroom, marking every special occasion she has missed with Deborah, Jeremy and big brothers Blake and Michael, now 13 and 11, since she mysteriously vanished from her crib on the night of Oct. 3, 2011. “No matter where she is right now, she’s still my daughter,” Deborah tells PEOPLE in this week’s issue, of the girl nicknamed “Pumpkin Pie.” “Just because someone else is raising her until I get her back does not mean that her birthdays and holidays should be missed.” “I don’t expect other people to understand,” she says. “It’s one of those things where everybody copes differently. My most important thing for her to know when she comes home is she was never forgotten.” • Subscribe now to PEOPLE, or pick up the latest issue, on newsstands now, for updates on the Lisa Irwin investigation. Police concede that, despite the hundreds of leads they’ve investigated along with those tips sent to the family’s website, FindLisaIrwin.com, authorities neither have any suspects nor any idea what happened to Lisa. “As with any case, if we have information that leads us down a certain direction, we will utilize all the resources we had at the very beginning,” Kansas City police Maj. Steve Young tells PEOPLE. “It’s still a case that we care very much about.” But with no definitive suspects or theories pointing toward a resolution, Lisa’s family is left to find their own ways to keep her in their lives until they have answers. • For more on this case, watch “What Happened to Baby Lisa?” on our new true crime show, People Magazine Investigates, Nov. 14 (10 p.m. ET) on Investigation Discovery. “I’ve had a picture of her right by my bed for five years, and even on the rare instances that I’m not home, I still bring one with me or have one on my phone,” says Jeremy, a 34-year-old electrician. “It’s always the last thing I do before I lay down and go to sleep: I tell her good night, and I give her a kiss.” “I feel like that’s a normal thing that I would absolutely do if she was home,” he tells PEOPLE. “I do it with both of my other boys. It’s just part of keeping her in the daily routine, if you will — just right on the front of your mind. And it helps, because you […]
The featured blog post Inside Baby Lisa’s Family: Keeping Hope Alive 5 Years After Her Mysterious Disappearance is republished from cellulitesolutions.org
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