INDIANAPOLIS (June 6, 2015) – More than a week after going missing, metro police are still searching for the body of missing three-month old Janna Rivera.
Last week the girl’s mother called 911, telling dispatchers the baby was dead.
Police have searched multiple locations for the girl’s body, going up against conflicting and sometimes confusing stories.
Jeff Fairbanks, Janna’s father, is the only person of interest in the case. Detectives have extensively questioned him, but no arrests have been made.
On Saturday in an email to FOX 59, Fairbanks explained his side of the story.
“Finding Janna was the most important thing, at first, because that gives us closure, a chance at a respectable burial, and exoneration,” Fairbanks wrote. “However, I am afraid that window may have passed.”
Fairbanks claims he put Janna’s body in a dumpster after he said she died of natural causes.
But Fairbanks never called 911.
“Believe it or not, it never even occurred to me,” he said in the email. “Once I couldn’t save her, all I could think about were the girls downstairs…I guess, in some strange way, I was trying to protect them, because I knew she was already gone.”
Fairbanks said he put his daughter’s body in the dumpster after he “…drove around aimlessly, waiting for her to wake up, praying, thinking somehow she would. It was like I was in another reality.”
Fairbanks added, “It sickened me to the point, that, when I got home and broke down and told the family, I told them that I had buried her, because I was already so ashamed of what I had done, I couldn’t face it.”
Metro police are continuing to follow-up on leads.
“As the case progressed, we have to be able to vet through all of these stories,” Sgt. Kendale Adams said Friday, with the Indianapolis Metro Police Department. “And so there is a plethora of information coming into detectives, many theories out there, and so we have to be able to really investigate that. That takes time, that takes investigative techniques so that whole process takes time.”
Fairbanks ended the email saying his daughter is in a safer place.
“Despite how I reacted,” he wrote. “She is safe and sound, in a better place than all of us, who do bad things, and judge others, when they have never experienced trauma of this nature.”
