Missing Baby Lisa Irwin: Could Family and Legal Drama Be Hampering the Case?
Amidst the frantic search for 11-month-old baby Lisa Irwin, who disappeared Oct. 3 from her Kansas City home, many officials fear that the family drama and legal troubles behind the scenes may be hurting the case, the most recent of which includes the split of the family's attorneys, according to ABC News.
Kansas City lawyer Cyndy Short was fired by the family's lead New York attorney Joe Tacopino last week, rehired, then fired twice again and finally made an official announcement Monday that she would not be working with the family anymore.
"Mr Tacopino and I were not able to work as a team," Short said at a news conference. "Our goals and approaches are so different that one of us had to go."
According to ABC News, the family said that they had made the right decision in dismissing Short because she was "holding her own press conferences and making statements to the media."
"These lawyers represent the family, not just potentially in a courtroom, but outside to the public," legal analyst Dan Abrams told "Good Morning America." "And so when there seems to be mixed messages coming from the legal team, that doesn't help the family."
In addition to troubles within the family's legal team, Lisa's parents, Deborah Bradley and Jeremy Irwin, have also been somewhat uncooperative with police in allowing their two sons, ages 6 and 8, to be re-interviewed after they had initially been questioned shortly after the baby was reported missing.
"When cops first found out baby Lisa's missing, they interview one child for 30 minutes, the other child for 50 minutes," said former prosecutor and HLN host Nancy Grace in an interview with Dr. Drew Pinksy. "That's not enough. And since that time, until the present, mommy and daddy have stonewalled the cops from talking to the children. They say they don't want the children traumatized. Mommy also says she said nothing to the children about baby Lisa missing; I don't believe that."