By Mark Hallum
The disappearance of Skye Azhar, 15, has mystified even his own mother since he was last heard rustling around downstairs in his Fresh Meadows home around 4 a.m. Jan. 31. A search of her son’s bedroom revealed a bundle of school work stuffed tightly under the bed and his cell phone, hidden deep in a drawer with all data wiped from it.
Kitty Azhar found her son had made the bed before he left, an unusual occurrence, and the next morning she filed a missing person report.
“I feel that — I don’t know — I think he was just getting bored and not applying himself,” Azhar said, describing the way her son had been failing classes in school and often wandering the city on the trains. “We had been trying to reach out to him and trying to include him in things to try out. My husband, his father, is a guitar player and he’d been trying to get him to start playing guitar with him. So it felt that we were trying to build a bridge at this time. It felt a little out of the blue. Any issues we’ve had had been happening recently.”
When Skye began hanging out in the wrong circles, his mother put an end to the friendships. Her son had complained over social media about Azhar going through his phone. Azhar had been using a tracking app to keep up with him through the phone he carried.
“It was just something I felt like I wanted to keep an eye on,” she said. “I think that would be part of the reason why he knew we would be using that tracker on the phone. When he did have [the phone], we would see where he would be during the day.”
Police from the 107th Precinct were given the abandoned phone after Azhar reported him missing, but she complained that they had taken the phone early in the day only to get it to the right department late that evening.
Azhar had little idea of where her son traveled on the trains he was riding during the day, but believes he mainly wandered aimlessly to keep himself busy. Other times, he traveled to Midtown Manhattan, where his father worked to visit him and ride the train back with him.
According to police, the 15-year-old is described as about 5-foot-5, about 110 pounds with brown eyes and short hair. The only items of clothing they could specify he might have had on were his beige Nike sneakers.
Azhar was going to a cafe Tuesday near the bus stop where her son would have likely launched his journey to find surveillance footage of what he would have been wearing when he left.
Reach reporter Mark Hallum by e-mail at mhall
