Missing Relisha Rudd. Via MPD.

Police are still searching for Relisha Rudd, the eight-year-old D.C. girl reported missing last week. But at a press conference today, Metropolitan Police Department Chief Cathy Lanier said she may have been murdered by a janitor employed at the homeless shelter where she was living with her family.

“We cannot ignore the possibility that he may have killed her,” Lanier said of 51-year-old Kahlil Tatum, who is wanted by Prince George’s County Police for the murder of his wife.

Lanier said Relisha was seen on March 1 with Tatum within the District of Columbia: “Relisha was in the company of Mr. Tatum with the permission of her mother.” The following day, Tatum purchased 42-gallon, contractor trash bags at a store in the city.

“Not long after that purchase,” Lanier said, he was then seen in the area near the Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens in Northeast D.C. “for a period of time.” (Police and FBI agents have been searching that area all day.) Tatum continued to go to work and was seen in multiple locations in D.C. between March 2 and March 20. “Relisha was not with Mr. Tatum in any of those sightings,” Lanier said.

This contradicts a date provided yesterday by Beatriz “BB” Otero, the Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services, who she said Relisha had been seen at Payne Elementary School on March 5. The discrepancy was not explained.

Tatum has not been seen since the homicide of his wife in Prince George’s County last week, according to Lanier.

“While this current operation in the Aquatic Gardens would be best described as a recovery operation, we have not given up hope that we still may find Relisha alive,” Lanier said.

When asked if charges will be brought against Relisha’s mother, Lanier said the priority is on finding her child. “Charges for anyone down the road, we’ll talk about those when the time comes,” she said.

A Washington Post article on the last few years of Relisha’s life paint a startling portrait of a child who seemingly fell through the cracks again and again.

City records show that D.C. agencies had contact with Relisha and her family beginning in 2007, when the girl was 1 or 2. The records show instances of physical abuse, filthy living conditions and a lack of food. But social workers did not remove Relisha and her siblings from the home, city records show.
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A report from November 2013, when the family lived at the homeless shelter at D.C. General, shows that a social worker noted that one of Young’s boys had been physically abused by being thrown to the ground, cutting open his lip, and slapped in the face. Records say the mother was “verbally abusive on a regular basis and would leave [the children] alone often.”

Relisha’s family has been at the shelter for 18 months. The median stay, according to a recent Department of Human Services oversight document, is 98 days. The longest is three years.