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Missing boy found in Oldsmar apartment

No one is sure how the 9-year-old ended up in that city a second time. The agency responsible for the boy declined comment.

By MARLON A. WALKER and NICOLE JOHNSON
Published May 25, 2006

ST. PETERSBURG - Nine-year-old Levi Dillard, who disappeared from state custody Saturday, was found safe in Oldsmar on Wednesday.

How he got there remains a mystery.

It was the third time the boy had run away since he was taken from his mother at the end of last month after she was accused of child abuse - and the second time he was found in Oldsmar.

His mother, Alicia Dillard of Dunedin, spent Tuesday looking for her son, angry and frustrated that the state accused her of being unfit to keep him and then lost track of him.

Levi was found with friends in an abandoned apartment along Tampa Road. He telephoned a friend Wednesday morning for a ride, said Pinellas County sheriff's spokesman Mac McMullen.

McMullen said Laurie Taglieri, 15020 Highfield Road in Spring Hill, and her son went to the Retreat apartment building off State Road 580 and Forest Lakes Boulevard, where she picked up Levi and another boy. She took the boys to the Oldsmar fire station at 225 N Pine Ave.

Sheriff's deputies arrived shortly afterward and took Levi and the other boy to the Pinellas Juvenile Assessment Center in Clearwater.

Levi was taken from Dillard after a teacher noticed bruises from a whipping she administered the day before. He was placed with the Safe Children Coalition after authorities deemed his mother's home unsafe. Since then, he has run away twice from a group home in Pinellas Park and Saturday from a St. Petersburg foster home.

Dillard declined to talk about her son Wednesday.

"It's stress," said Dillard, who is trying to get her son back from state custody. "I'm about to have a nervous breakdown."

On Wednesday afternoon, a manager at the Retreat, a 400-unit apartment complex being converted to condominiums at 100 Old Village Way, said she was unaware that any runaways had stayed there.

An airy show room at the front of the complex with a large aquarium greets interested home buyers. Condominiums in the complex start in the low $100,000s. A walk through the complex revealed several of the freshly painted, light-blue condos were vacant.

A spokeswoman for the Safe Children Coalition, responsible for Levi's care, declined to discuss his whereabouts or other details of his case.

Marlon A. Walker can be reached at 727 893-8737 or mwalker@sptimes.com

[Last modified May 25, 2006, 00:55:15]