Police: Missing girl’s parents are being uncooperative

By Tony Burbeck

WCNC-TV

Investigators searching for a missing Rowan County teenager say nothing the girl’s adoptive parents told them during two days worth of questioning was true, and the family is not being cooperative.

Erica Parsons’ older brother reported her missing last week. It appears the last time people at the family home on Miller Chapel Road in Salisbury saw her was November 2011.

Attorney Carlyle Sherrill, hired by the Parsons family, says someone picked up Erica up claiming to be a friend or relative of Erica's biological parents, and that it was someone the girl previously visited in the mountains a handful of times before.

Sherrill also says Erica called her adoptive parents a short time after she left home and told them she wasn't coming back.

The family apparently did not resist because Erica told them she didn't want to be with them and was happier elsewhere, plus the parents were dealing with illnesses and raising other kids, Sherrill said.

Sherrill says investigators questioned the Parsons family over two days, and just because they say the story isn't true doesn't mean the adoptive mother and father lied.

"They're just relaying what their understanding of the situation was. If it's wrong, it's not because they fabricated anything. It's because what they were told was wrong," he said.

Sherrill says the parents stopped talking to investigators when the line of questioning became accusatory. Nobody has been arrested or charged in Erica's disappearance.

"They were insinuating they had something to do with what happened to Erica," Sherrill said.

Sherrill says the parents told him investigators threatened to dig up their yard in their search for the teen.

Sherrill says Erica's brother was having trouble at home, got into a fight with his parents and got moved out of the house - and that it could be a reason why the brother reported Erica missing now instead of in 2011.

For now, it appears no one knows where Erica Lynn Parsons is, or who she left with in 2011.