'Tell Us Where Chance Is': Family Pleads with Jailed Parents to Tell Authorities What Happened to Their Missing 9-Week-Old Son

Police are searching for Chance Walsh, who hasn't been seen since Sept. 9

Photo: Sarasota Sherriff

In an emotional press conference, the grandmother of missing 9-week-old Chance Walsh pleaded with the infant’s parents to tell investigators what happened to the baby boy.

Kristen Bury, 32, and Joseph Walsh, 36, are currently being held in South Carolina while police search for their infant son – who hasn’t been seen since Sept. 9 – in North Port, Florida, where the couple has a home.

“We are hoping Kristen and Joseph, who were apprehended by the FBI and are in custody, will do what’s right and tell us where Chance is,” Sally Susino, Bury’s mother and Chance’s grandmother, said Thursday.

Police were first alerted that Chance was missing after Susino called authorities to report that she hadn’t seen him in a nearly a month. She also said that Bury and Walsh had allegedly told relatives contradictory stories to explain his absence, “including that the child was unharmed, that he died in [a car] crash and that they gave him to a woman at a hotel in Georgia,” according to a police press release.

A search of the couple’s home turned up bloodstains and evidence of blood splatter on the walls, cops said. Cadaver dogs also indicated the presence of possible human remains, according to an arrest report obtained by PEOPLE.

For their part, Bury and Walsh – who have a history of drug use, according to police – allegedly aren’t cooperating with authorities and have allegedly showed no interest in the whereabouts of their young son, police said.

“We just want to bring him home, where he’s loved,” Susino said Thursday. “We ask for everyone for your continued prayers.”

She added: “Please if you know anything, anything that could help, please share it. Share it on Facebook. Use your media and get it out there and help us find him.”

Bury and Walsh are currently charged with child neglect in Chance’s disappearance. This is not the first time a child of theirs has died – they lost another son, Duane, in 2014. Duane was just 2 weeks old when he allegedly died of a kidney infection that resulted from a botched circumcision, a friend told PEOPLE Thursday.

After Duane’s untimely death, the North Port community banded together to help the family. But now people are feeling angry that they were taken advantage of, the friend said.

“I’m flabbergasted. I don’t even know,” she said. “My sisters have helped her, the community helped her. I would have never imagined this at all.”

She added, trailing off with a sob: “To physically harm a baby … I just can’t.”

According to a probable cause affidavit obtained by PEOPLE, Bury allegedly told her stepmother that she “despised” Chance whenever she would look at him because he was not Duane and said it was “better that he was not around because she would have hurt him.”

Anyone with information is asked to call the Criminal Investigations Section at 941-861-4074 or if you wish to remain anonymous contact Crime Stoppers of Sarasota County, 941-366-TIPS (8477), or online at www.sarasotacrimestoppers.com.

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