Reader discretion: this story contains details of violence some readers may find distressing.
Shortly after 9 a.m. on Thursday, April 18, 2019, a 911 dispatcher in Crystal Lake, Illinois, picked up a call from a father who sounded worried.
His son was missing. The boy was 5 years old.
“We’ve checked closets, the basement, the garage, everywhere,” Andrew Freund Sr. told the dispatcher. He said he had looked in the park and at a nearby school. He had even checked a gas station down the road where they sometimes took the boy to buy treats.
There was no sign of Andrew “AJ” Freund anywhere.
The house on Dole Avenue
Crystal Lake is a quiet, leafy town northwest of Chicago. AJ lived there with his father, 60, his mother, JoAnn Cunningham, 36, and his baby brother in a white house on Dole Avenue.
His father’s story was simple. His wife had put AJ to bed the night before, after prayers. In the morning, Freund said, he went to a doctor’s appointment. When he came home, AJ was gone.
Police took it seriously from the first minute. Officers and search dogs from several agencies went door to door. The FBI joined the search. Detectives asked neighbors for their home camera footage.
On the following Tuesday, sonar teams searched the pond in Veteran Acres Park. Others walked through the woods of Stern Woods. They found nothing.
Within days, police said something that changed the mood in town. There was no evidence, they said, that AJ had walked away. There was no evidence that a stranger had taken him. The investigation was “focusing on the residence and the individuals that may have seen or had contact with AJ last.”
The parents
AJ’s father told reporters he was cooperating fully with police and was out searching for his son on his own.
His mother was not cooperating. Police said JoAnn Cunningham refused to talk to detectives. The day AJ was reported missing, she was arrested on an outstanding traffic warrant, shortly after the couple went to the police station to speak with investigators.
AJ’s baby brother was taken into the custody of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services.
Then the police released something else: their records of the house. Over the previous five years, officers had been called to the home on Dole Avenue 17 times. The reports described unacceptable living conditions, concerns from child welfare officials and suspected drug use. Photos taken inside the house years earlier showed filthy rooms.
The bruise
There had been a warning only four months earlier.
Days before Christmas 2018, police went to the house after a report of neglect. AJ had a large bruise on his hip. He was taken to a doctor at a McHenry County hospital, who could not say for sure what had caused it. It could have been a dog, a belt or a football, the doctor said.
AJ and his mother suggested the family dog, a 60-pound boxer, had done it.
Later, according to a timeline released by DCFS, the boy said something else. “Maybe someone hit me with a belt,” he said. “Maybe Mommy didn’t mean to hurt me.”
The DCFS investigator, Carlos Acosta, did not seek another medical opinion. On January 4, 2019, he and his supervisor closed the case as unfounded. AJ stayed in the house.
Six days
The search went on through the weekend and into the next week. Balloons and stuffed animals began to pile up on the lawn on Dole Avenue. Neighbors held a vigil and prayed for a little boy to come home.
Inside the investigation, detectives were working on something smaller and much quieter: the parents’ phones.
Andrew Freund Sr. had signed a consent form allowing police to search his cellphone. Forensic examiners went through the data linked to the family’s devices, including JoAnn Cunningham’s Apple account. They were looking for anything that had been deleted.
They found it.
The video was about two minutes long. It had been recorded in March, about six weeks before AJ disappeared, and it had been deleted.
On Wednesday, April 24, detectives sat Andrew Freund Sr. down in an interview room and played it for him.
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