It's been almost 24 hours since a Carthage baby was reported missing, and last Friday night, it's unclear whether police are any closer to finding him than when the search began.

  Police say they still believe they will find 8-month-old Eddie Salazar alive, but the odds of that happening in the woods, water, dumpsters- anything within close proximity to the child's home- are getting slimmer.

  A major hang-up has been a lack of eyewitnesses.

  "The dog woke me up at 11p.m. so I let her out, didn't think anything was going on."

  Pam Boswell's late night account is a disappointingly familiar one.

  Few neighbors on Carthage's Mound Street knew anything out of the ordinary was going on, until it had.

  "I didn't hear anything," Boswell says.

  But Salazar's father told police there was a struggle Thursday night around 11.

  He claims two masked men broke into his home, beat him up, and stole his baby.

  "We always have to believe what we're told. You always believe the victim and the story they give is the story you go with," says Carthage Police Chief Greg Dagnan.

  So police were on the hunt.

  "Geographically it was about 15 to 20 blocks in the city area. We did push out a little further on the east side of town. It's more rural, we've got the lake out there and the river area," explains Missouri Highway Patrol Sergeant Mike Watson.

  Both of which were combed by Missouri Water Patrol officers Friday afternoon.

  But now the thorough ground searching is over.

 "We still have the investigation out following up leads but as far as people doing the ground search around the radius of the house- that's what we've stopped," Watson tells us.

  Instead, efforts are being focused outside the immediate area of Salazar's disappearance, which has the whole neighborhood second-guessing the familiar.

  "The kids are all out playing all the time. We watch out for everybody's kids because being a grandma automatically if I'm home I have the door open in the summer, watch all the kids play, kind of keep an eye on them."

  Boswell says the Salazars moved in about eight months ago, right around the time Eddie was born.

  They have another child, a toddler, who was also home at the time of the attack and unharmed.

  Boswell says the mother speaks very little English, but the father is fluent.

  Still, police say they've been using an interpreter to communicate with family members in Spanish.