Normalcy key for missing Barstow woman's mother, daughters

On Feb. 15, Leisa Hurst turned 31. The family tried to treat it like any other birthday: Hurst’s mother, Deborah Welch, took her two granddaughters out for sushi, Hurst’s favorite cuisine.

“We cope by living as normal as possible,” said Welch, whose daughter has been missing since Jan. 22. That normalcy rubs off on 9-year-old Tyler and 12-year-old Ashlyn, who Welch said are continuing their habit of scoring A’s and B’s in school while Welch, from Arizona, is staying at Hurst’s Barstow home to care for them.

But life outside of the home has been anything but normal. Daylong searches for pieces of evidence have stoked uncertainty about Hurst’s still-missing body while the arrest of Hurst’s alleged boyfriend has thrown what Welch thought was her daughter’s happy relationship into doubt.

Helendale resident Jeami Chiapulis is in custody awaiting trial and charged with Hurst’s murder. Hurst met Chiapulis at Barstow Community College about two and a half years ago when she began courses to become certified as a teacher, said Welch, who described the couple’s relationship as warm.

According to Welch, who said she spoke to her daughter weekly, Hurst had planned to move into Chiapulis’ Helendale home with her two daughters the weekend she went missing. Welch said she planned to come to Barstow herself that weekend to help with the move.

“In the years they were together, I’d hear ‘Jeami this’ and ‘Jeami that,’” Welch said. “She’d text him all the time. If they had a fight it was usually for a short time.”

Welch said she met Chiapulis twice. He even got along well with Leisa’s young daughters, she said.

“He seemed nice and polite,” Welch said. “He was a likable guy as far as I knew.”

But police believe Chiapulis led other lives that were masked by his relationship with Hurst. According to Det. Keith Libby, the case’s lead investigator, Chiapulis is married and carried on several relationships with other women while with Hurst.

Welch said she and Leisa were completely unaware of Chiapulis’ wife, who does not live in the state, or his other relationships.

Days after Leisa went missing, police began searching Chiapulis’ home. During the first search, Chiapulis agreed to allow detectives into his Helendale home in the Silver Lakes neighborhood. After they found pieces of evidence linking Chiapulis to Hurst’s case, investigators returned the next day with a warrant to search the house again.

By then, Chiapulis had stopped cooperating with police, Libby said, and checked himself into the psychiatric ward of a hospital where he stayed for nearly three weeks.

Chiapulis had been released from the hospital and was at a Redlands motel when he was arrested Feb. 13.

Welch called the community response “very touching.” About 170 people showed up to the first volunteer search party in Helendale. That crowd swelled to over 250 for the second search in Oro Grande, which covered about 17 square miles of area along a 10-mile stretch on both sides of the Mojave River, according to Loren Brewster, Hurst’s uncle.

“Missing persons searches are a process of eliminating areas and we now have eliminated many areas where we know Leisa is not,” Brewster stated via e-mail. Welch said there is no date set for the next search.

Volunteers brought more than just themselves, using horses and ATVs on loan from other volunteers, and even an aerial drone brought by Trinity Search and Recovery, an organization specializing in missing persons cases. The drone provided high-resolution photos of the terrain in the hope that a birds-eye shot would reveal evidence related to the case or the body’s location.

Even without Hurst’s body, prosecutors and detectives said they felt confident enough with other evidence to charge Chiapulis with her murder.

“These kind of prosecutions are not frequent but they have happened,” said Deputy District Attorney Sean Daugherty, who declined to comment on specifics. “The courts have consistently held that in these types of cases you can prove murder through circumstantial evidence. We felt we had enough to pursue a charge.”

Chiapulis’ next scheduled court date is a preliminary deposition on March 24, said Daugherty, who is handling the case.

Anyone with information on the case is asked to contact Det. Keith Libby at 760-256-2211. Those wishing to remain anonymous can call the WE-TIP hotline at 1-800-78-CRIME or visit its Web site at www.wetip.com.

Contact the writer:
(760) 256-4126 or
cnguyen@desertdispatch.com