Baby Gabriel Likely Still Alive, Cops Say

Jan. 7, 2010— -- A missing 8-month-old Arizona baby is likely still alive, despite his young mother's claim that she killed him, according to police.

Gabriel Johnson's biological father, Logan McQueary, is begging for the return of his son, who was taken cross-country by his mother, Elizabeth Johnson, last month. He and police believe Johnson may have left the couple's son with people she met in San Antonio, Texas, in an effort to hide Gabriel from McQueary.

"Please, do the right thing and turn him over. Don't worry about getting in trouble or anything like that," McQueary said on "Good Morning America" today to whoever knows where Gabriel is. "Please. I want my son back."

Although police say they now have indications to the contrary, McQueary said he received text messages from his ex-girlfriend while she was on the run, claiming to have murdered their baby. She was arrested Dec. 29 in Miami Beach without Gabriel and charged with interfering with custody.

"The last indications that we have was that Gabriel was alive and well in the San Antonio area on Dec. 26," Tempe Police Sgt. Steve Carbajal told "Good Morning America" today. "We are receiving some indications that Gabriel is still alive and we're very optimistic about that."

In a jailhouse interview this week with a Phoenix CBS affiliate, Johnson, 23, of Tempe, Ariz., denied harming their son, saying she told McQueary she had killed Gabriel to get back at him.

"He had ruined my life and he hurt me and I wanted to hurt him," she said. "And that was the only thing I could say that would hurt him."

She claimed in the same interview to have left her son with a random couple she met in a San Antonio park, but that she didn't know anything about them other than that they seemed trustworthy.

Johnson's grandfather, Bob Johnson, told ABC News that he doesn't believe his granddaughter's story that she simply left her child with an unknown couple.

"I think that she has given the baby to somebody and I think she knows who it is," he said. "I think it's in San Antonio in somebody else's house and she just ain't given it up.

"She has an anger-management problem and she's working on that," Bob Johnson said.