ENGLEWOOD, Co. — After Richard Berrelez lost his granddaughter to a child-abducting killer, he formed the ALIE Foundation: “Abducted, Lost, Innocent, Enough.” The mission: To supply police with dogs to find abducted children before it’s too late.
A neighbor abducted and killed 5-year-old Alie Berrelez outside a Colorado apartment complex over 20 years ago. A bloodhound found Alie’s body four days after she disappeared.
Alie’s killer was identified using DNA as 41-year-old Nicholas Stofer. He was a former neighbor, but he was found dead of natural causes in his Phoenix apartment in Oct. 2001.
“I’m trying to keep those people away for the past 20 years–not from Alie because Alie is already gone. But I try to keep that type of people away from children like Jessica,” he says.
The successes of ALIE Foundation dogs are many, and families are thankful for the work of the bloodhounds.
“We want a bloodhound to be available for other children when children are abducted within the hour so they can start looking for that child right away,” says Berrelez.
Bloodhounds are able to “catalog” scents, particularly human scents, and follow them over great distances over several days, even over water. The ALIE Foundation has now supplied close to 500 bloodhounds to law enforcement agencies over the last 21 years since Alie was killed.
The foundation aims to keep hope alive by keeping their hounds’ noses to the ground and their tails in the air, doing their very best to bring families back together one missing kid at a time.
