http://www.recordonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100109/NEWS/1090333
Police resume search for boy, 4
New lead cited in Newburgh disappearance
By Michael Randall
Times Herald-Record
Posted: January 09, 2010 - 2:00 AM
CITY OF NEWBURGH Police will hit the streets again Saturday as they continue pursuing a new lead in the disappearance of Marc Anthony Bookal.
The ground search for the missing 4-year-old boy resumed Friday, only four days after city police declared it was over. By day's end, the search had turned up nothing new.
City police spokesman Lt. Charles Broe said investigators "developed new information" that prompted the reopening of the search.
He wouldn't say what that new information was, but on Friday it led a team of city and state police, including one trooper with a K-9 partner, to the block where Bookal lives, and where he was last seen.
Police searched in vacant buildings and backyards in the block bounded by Liberty, Renwick and South Lander streets and Benkard Avenue.
That included another search inside the long-vacant Liberty Street School. Broe said the school has been searched not only by cop-dog teams but by investigators from the state Office of Fire Prevention and Control, whose specialty is searching through burned-out buildings.
The initial ground search covered the entire southeast quadrant of the city, and police also searched the Hudson River extensively.
Broe said the new search is focusing on the blocks nearest to Bookal's 11 Benkard Ave. home.
It might continue beyond Saturday depending on what police find.
Bookal disappeared from his home Dec. 14. His mother's live-in boyfriend, Cory Byrd, 30, was charged with endangering the welfare of a child, a misdemeanor.
Byrd has not been named as a suspect in the boy's disappearance but remains in Orange County Jail on the endangering charge and a parole violation.
He is due in City Court next week.
mrandall@th-record.com