Jennifer Rodriguez remembers her son, Patrick Alford, blowing out the candles on his white-frosted birthday cake last year, then rushing out to play on his brand-new skateboard.
But there will be no cake for his birthday Sunday. Two months after the Staten Island boy turned 7, he vanished.
And despite one of the police department’s most exhaustive searches in missing-person memory, including 1,000 interviews, and queries as far away as Florida and Puerto Rico, Patrick is no closer to being found than the day he disappeared from the Brooklyn foster home, where he was staying after Rodriguez lost custody.
When Patrick turns 8, Rodriguez won’t be celebrating. She ignored Thanksgiving, and without her boy, Christmas and New Year’s are just a couple of days on her calendar.
“His birthday is a tragedy to me this year,” she said. “I’m not thankful for anything. I don’t even know if my son is alive.”
Much happened between the day Rodriguez sang “Happy Birthday” in her Staten Island home and the day Patrick disappeared from the East New York apartment building.
After Rodriguez, 23, a single mother, was arrested in December on a shoplifting charge, Patrick and his sister, Jailene, were sent by the city’s child welfare agency to live with Librada Moran, a foster-care provider.
It was there on Jan. 22 that the homesick boy was last seen.
“I would tell Patrick, ‘I’m sorry,’ ” Rodriguez said. ” ‘I’m sorry I failed you as a mother. I’m going to do my best to find you.’ ”
Last month, Rodriguez sued the city and its child-welfare agency, saying they failed to properly care for the boy.
She also criticized investigators for focusing, at first, on her.
“The police treated me like a suspect,” Rodriguez said. “I felt like a piece of garbage. I am his biological mother, and I was the one who sought out help on my own. The city’s foster agency is there to protect children, and they didn’t do that for Patrick.”
Rodriguez is marking Patrick’s birthday with an awareness walk to her home from the ferry terminal a mile away. She will follow up the walk with another march on Jan. 22 — the day Patrick disappeared.
“I am brokenhearted,” Rodriguez said. “I need to find my son.”