By JUDY RATTNER
In a phone interview Tuesday afternoon, Nassau County Detective Lieutenant Kevin Smith said, We-re treating this as a missing person case which we-re actively pursuing. So we are endeavoring to locate Walsh. What happened is that her car was discovered on the side of the Seaford Oyster Bay Expressway on the shoulder of the road near the Exit 9 entrance ramp. She apparently was on her way to work. She is a special ed teacher at a private school in Glen Cove. Apparently she never arrived at school. The emergency contact number they had was her parents.
At about 6:30 on Monday morning, one of those Department of Transportation HELP trucks saw her car on the side of the road. That employee discovered that her car had a flat tire on the front right side. As a procedure he called it in as a disabled car with the operator not there. He also put a tag on the window. Sometime before noon, the school made a notification to the parents. Her mother got the call and she immediately called her husband. He-s a school bus driver and he happens to be northbound on Route 135, on the way to the Plainview area. He sees what appears to be his daughter-s car, he stops, walks over to it and notes the front tire is flat and it has been tagged. He calls his son-in-law to let him know he-s found the car. He goes back to his route.
What happened next is that the son-in-law responds to the scene. He doesn-t find his wife and sees the car has a flat tire and calls 9/11. A highway patrol arrives and we begin this investigation. We conduct an extensive search of the whole area, which is bordered by Bethpage State Park. We use our highway patrol, canine, air bureau and mounted units. State Park police and others are also involved. This reveals negative results. While her husband was there, we found her purse in a depressed area adjacent to the shoulder of the road.
The finding of the purse concerned us, continued Smith, and we still have a missing person and no crime. There were no outward signs of foul play. We impounded her car for forensic testing. We remain optimistic and will pursue any lead we receive. We are also asking for the public-s help. We-re asking anyone who may have seen the vehicle, a black 2005 Ford Focus, with a large Mets sticker on the window, to give us a call at 1-800-244- TIPS.
On Tuesday, reporters and camera crews from many media outlets were gathered outside Walsh-s parents- home in Rockville Centre. Her mother, Mattie Herschel, and her husband of three years, William Walsh, spoke with them, each pleading for help in finding Leah. Police say they questioned William Walsh for hours on Tuesday, but they emphasized it was a routine part of their investigation. Early Wednesday morning, police were stopping motorists heading north on the Seaford Oyster Bay Expressway, handing out fliers and asking if they had seen anything Monday morning relating to the case.
Leah Walsh received her Master-s Degree in Special Education from Molloy College last May. She and her husband lived for a while in Rockville Centre and recently moved to an apartment in Bethpage.
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