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Taunton man intent on finding friend missing 10 months
Jan 11, 2020 at 12:19 PM
TAUNTON – Eddie Pimental of Taunton wants to get the word out that his close friend Lisa Hazard is still missing.
“Until I know for a fact she’s alive and breathing I’m not gonna stop looking for her,” he said.
Hazard was 29 last March when Pimental says she went missing after visiting her 3-year-old son for a couple days at the New Bedford home of the boy’s biological father.
Pimental, 34, says he last spoke to Hazard the night of March 4, 2019, when she told him she was packing her stuff in anticipation of getting a ride from New Bedford to enter a drug rehabilitation facility.
Hazard, he said, grew up in Taunton and is a graduate of Bristol-Plymouth Regional Technical School.
Pimental says she alternately had been spending nights and days at her mother’s Fall River apartment and the Chandler Avenue apartment in Taunton where he lives with his mother.
It was from Fall River, he said, that Hazard departed the day she traveled to New Bedford.
Pimental says Hazard’s family reported her missing to Fall River police about a month after he last spoke to her on the phone.
But he says it wasn’t until early June after he made repeated calls to Fall River police — including the chief’s office — as well as a phone call to the mayor’s office that police issued a press release to media outlets listing Hazard as a missing person and asking for the public’s help in locating her.
“I made five formal complaints to the police, but they thought it wasn’t serious,” Pimental said.
The June 4 press release from Fall River police states that Hazard at the time had been missing for three months.
It described her as 5-foot-9 with brown hair, brown eyes, having a slim build and medium complexion and last seen wearing black sweat pants and brown boots.
Unlike Pimental’s account, the police release states she did not tell her family where she was going that night.
Hazard’s disappearance was also noted by the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs), which describes itself as a national clearinghouse and resource center.
The NamUs posting states that Hazard left New Bedford in the early morning of March 3, as opposed to Pimental’s recollection of a March 4 date, and that she told her son’s father she was “going to Fall River to procure drugs before checking into rehab.”
It also notes that Hazard has a Zodiac tattoo on her right wrist.
Pimental doesn’t deny that both he and Hazard have had a history of drug use and that she was scheduled to begin treatment at a rehabilitation facility.
But he says after one of Hazard’s sisters died of an overdose, a few months before her own disappearance, she was making an effort to get herself clean and take responsibility for her actions.
“She took it upon herself to be an adult and didn’t want to spiral out of control,” Pimental said.
And knowing that Hazard had said she was about to go into rehab and then went missing worries him even more.
Pimental believes that police would have made a more concerted effort to track down leads if not for the fact that Hazard — who at one time he says he considered to be his girlfriend — didn’t have a reputation for abusing drugs.
“If you have a drug history you’re screwed,” he said.
Pimental, who is currently unemployed, says it was his decision to take an active role in keeping in regular contact with the Fall River police department’s detective division.
“I’ve been harassing them for five months,” he said.
Pimental said he sat down in early June with two Fall River detectives, who interviewed and listened to him for an hour and a half inside Taunton Police headquarters.
But he says he subsequently was disappointed to learn that the lead detective had been transferred to a different job and that her replacement knew nothing about the case by the time Pimental got him on the phone.
In addition to previously contacting the police and mayor’s office in Fall River, Pimental says he called Taunton police and the office of then-Mayor Thomas Hoye Jr.
Pimental says he’s urged police to track down and interview a small-time drug dealer who had been selling drugs to Hazard.
But he says Fall River police have said they’ve been unable to find him.
Pimental believes the man, who according to published reports has previously been arrested for possession of fentanyl, was the last person to have seen Hazard.
He says he’s provided police with screenshot evidence of Facebook messages, indicating that the man lied when he claimed the last time he’d been in contact with Hazard was the previous January.
“I’m not saying that he did anything to her, but I think he knows something,” Pimental said.
Pimental says Hazard’s mother has been “extremely worried.”
“It’s killing her,” he said.
Other relatives are also holding out hope that Hazard will be found alive, Pimental added.
“They’re relying on police to do their job, but I have no faith in police at this point,” he said. “It’s taken way too long, and they started too late.”
Pimental said a close friend of Hazard who lives in California has helped him spread the word about her disappearance via Facebook.
“A lot of people shared our story,” after it was posted, he said.
Pimental also has been putting up posters announcing a $1,000 reward for any credible evidence leading to Hazard’s whereabouts, with the money to be paid by one of her aunts.
The missing person poster also states that “Lisa’s account has been logged into on multiple devices (she) has used in the past.”
Pimental says it’s unfathomable that Hazard would simply leave the area without letting either him or someone else know.
“We had a close relationship. We spoke every day. We confided in each other. She would have called us,” he said.
“She missed Thanksgiving, Christmas and her kid’s birthday,” Pimental said, adding that “she’s a responsible adult who takes care of her son and loves her son.”
Anyone with information leading to the whereabouts of Lisa Hazard is urged to call Fall River police at 508-676-8511 or the department’s anonymous tip line at 508-672-8477.
Calls left seeking comment from both the Fall River and Taunton police departments were not returned.
