Sky Elijah Metalwala

Case background and investigation

Sky Elijah Metalwala was a two-year-old boy from Bellevue, Washington, born September 6, 2009. On the morning of November 6, 2011, his mother, Julia Biryukova, reported him missing under circumstances that investigators would quickly come to doubt. According to Biryukova, Sky had woken up ill, and she put him and his four-year-old sister in her silver 1998 Acura Integra to drive him to a hospital. She said the car ran out of gas along a Bellevue street, so she left Sky alone in his car seat and walked, with her daughter, roughly a mile to find help. When she returned about an hour and a half later, she said, Sky was gone.

Police response soon revealed problems with the account. When officers checked the abandoned car, they found it had plenty of gas and no mechanical issues, directly contradicting Biryukova's explanation for why she had left her sick toddler alone. Investigators also determined that no one outside the immediate household had actually seen Sky for roughly two weeks before he was reported missing, raising the possibility that he had disappeared well before the day his mother described.

The investigation grew into one of the largest in the region. Bellevue, Redmond, and FBI investigators pursued more than 2,500 tips and invested some 14,000 hours and around $2 million in the search. Biryukova, however, cooperated with detectives only on the day Sky was reported missing and then declined to speak with them further, reportedly refusing a polygraph examination. She was never charged, and neither was anyone else. The family had drawn police attention once before: when Sky was an infant, both parents left him in a car in a Target parking lot in freezing weather, leading to reckless-endangerment charges that were later dropped after a parenting class.

Sky's father, Solomon Metalwala, who was separated from Biryukova, has long maintained hope that his son is alive and has publicly pleaded for information. No trace of Sky has ever been found. Authorities released an age-progression image in 2020 showing what he might look like around age 10, and the case is tracked in the national NamUs database as an open missing-persons file. More than a decade after a toddler was reported vanished from a car on a Bellevue street, the true circumstances of Sky Metalwala's disappearance remain unexplained, and his mother's continued silence has left the central questions of the case unanswered. Police have said they believe someone knows what happened and continue to ask the public for tips.