Missing toddler's grandmother speaks out

WATERVILLE, Maine -- The grandmother of a 21-month-old girl missing in Maine is speaking publicly for the first time -- and as police continue their criminal investigation, the girl’s father says he's not giving up hope that she will be found alive.

In her first television interview, the missing child's grandmother, Phoebe Dipietro, says she's living a nightmare.

“You're waiting for a phone call, hoping the police have your granddaughter,” she said.

But so far, that phone call hasn't come.

The toddler -- who now would be 21 months old -- disappeared in the middle of the night a week before Christmas.

“She's quiet, very sweet, her eyes, she's got the bluest eyes and the longest eyelashes,” Phoebe Dipietro said.

She says Ayla's father Justin put her to bed around 8 p.m. The next day before 9 a.m., he called police to report her gone.

Over the weekend, Justin Dipietro was out putting up flyers, hoping for a break in his little girl's disappearance.

“I'd like to have her face on every street corner in America,” he said.

After Ayla vanished, her grandmother told detectives some things around the house didn't look the same.

“Some oddities that I had noticed. And we told the law enforcement, you know, what those were,” she recounted. But she would not reveal exactly what she was talking about.

“I'd give everything I owned if we can have her back,” she said.

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