and visited the petting zoo. Without picking up her niece, or calling the girl's mother, Lodzinski went straight to the carnival, and arrived there shortly after 7 p.m. Some unspecified time later, she encountered another niece, Jennifer Blair, with a friend. When they saw her looking around urgently, she told them she had lost sight of Wiltsey when she left him waiting in a carnival ride line as she went to buy a soda. The three went to report the incident to a Sayreville auxiliary police officer. Investigation The carnival was immediately shut down. Police officers, firefighters, volunteers, and trained dogs immediately launched an exhaustive search of the carnival grounds and the surrounding area but found neither Wiltsey nor any evidence he had been in the area. A firefighter who drove Lodzinski back to her house to get an item the dogs could use to get Wiltsey's scent recalled that when she stopped at the bar her then-boyfriend worked at to tell him what had happened, she was crying and speaking incoherently. The Sayreville police detective who took her home for the night after the search was suspended at 2 a.m. wrote in his report that she was tearful; her sister, whom she informed of Wiltsey's disappearance on the phone in the next couple of hours, says she cried. The next morning, after the search resumed, another detective at the station when she brought clothes for her son to wear if he were found, recalled her demeanor as distraught. Over the next few days, police interviewed carnival workers and visitors to see if they had seen Wiltsey at the carnival. One worker said that shortly after 7 p.m. that evening, she had seen a boy wearing a red tank top and red printed shorts, similar to the clothes Lodzinski said Wiltsey had been wearing, come up to her stand and get called away by a woman. Roughly 10 minutes later she saw the same woman walking around alone calling out "Timmy" or "Jimmy" and looking concerned; she identified Wiltsey in a group picture and, upon seeing Lodzinski in person, said she might have been the woman. Another carnival worker recalled helping a boy with a tank top, shorts, and sneakers with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on them off his ride around 7:15. He later told police it was definitely the boy he saw on posters. Three teenagers recalled telling