Top-10 Fugitive Wanted Since 2023 in Alleged Murder of Son Arrested, FBI Director Announces

The FBI announced on Aug 21 that one of the bureau’s top 10 most wanted fugitives was arrested this week for the alleged murder of her son and is now set to face charges in Texas.

Two years ago, Cindy Rodriguez Singh was charged with capital murder in the death of Noel Alvarez, her young son, according to a notice published by the FBI last year. Officials said that the boy had not been seen alive since October 2022 and that officials in Texas in 2023 carried out a welfare check on behalf of the child. Rodriguez Singh then “lied to officers when she explained that the boy was living with his biological father in Mexico,” according to the FBI. She told officers he’d been there since November 2022.

The agency said that Rodriguez Singh, her husband, and six other juvenile children took a flight to India, and it was determined by authorities that Noel Alvarez was not present on the flight.

The FBI didn’t say where Rodriguez Singh was arrested, but FBI Director Kash Patel wrote in a post on X that she is in custody on charges of capital murder and unlawful flight to avoid prosecution in the death of her son.

“This is the 4th ’10 Most Wanted’ fugitive arrested in the last 7 months,” Patel said in the Aug. 20 post. “That’s a credit to tremendous field work, law enforcement partners, intelligence operatives, and an administration who is letting good cops do their jobs.”

While speaking to Fox News’s Larry Kudlow on the morning of Aug. 21, Patel said that Rodriguez Singh “is now in FBI custody and is now on her way to face prosecution in the state of Texas.”

The FBI had offered a reward of up to $25,000 for information leading to her arrest, increasing the reward later to $250,000. She was placed on the FBI’s most wanted list in July of this year.

Officials have said that Noel Alvarez’s body has not been located.

“The immediate capture of Cindy Rodriguez Singh is so incredibly important in the interest of justice, the safety of our communities, as well as the safety of the other children in her custody,” Everman, Texas, Police Chief Craig Spencer said in a statement last year.

In March, Mexican officials handed over one of the FBI’s 10 most wanted fugitives, a gang leader from El Salvador, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ).

Francisco Javier Román-Bardales is “a high-ranking leader of La Mara Salvatrucha, also known as ‘MS-13,'” who was arrested in March in the mountains of the Gulf coast state of Veracruz by soldiers and federal agents, the DOJ said.

Also in March, the FBI added 43-year-old Ryan Wedding to its 10 most wanted list, while also announcing the U.S. State Department’s $10 million reward offer. He’s wanted for allegedly running a multinational drug trafficking network and orchestrating multiple murders related to the drug ring.

Akil Davis, assistant director of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office, said in a statement at the time about the suspect that “the alleged murders of his competitors make Wedding a very dangerous man.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.