Sky Metalwala

In February 2019, Julia Morgan (formerly Biryukova) testified in court again, accusing Alan Morgan of violating a no-contact order. She acknowledged that she was not allowed to be alone with her new son without an observer present. Bellevue Police Spokesperson Seth Tyler said "We do believe she knows where Sky is." She refused to talk to the press after the court appearance.

In 2015, on the case's fourth anniversary, Bellevue's new police chief Steve Mylett appealed publicly to Biryukova to talk to them again. "I am convinced you hold the key to finding Sky," he said in a local newspaper. While the previous year the department said it had exhausted all the leads that had been reported to it, at that time Mylett claimed Solomon had shared some unspecified new information with them that might prove useful. Images of Sky that had been digitally age progressed to show how he might appear at that time were distributed along with the original photos.

Around the time of the fourth anniversary of the disappearance in 2015, it was reported that Biryukova had not only remarried the previous year but borne her third child by her new husband in July. DSHS workers were trying to have the infant removed from her care.

In 2015, DSHS was most concerned about Biryukova's mental health, given her OCD diagnosis and past hospitalizations, following a complaint from the person who delivered the child. They also found the father, Alan Morgan, a convicted felon, problematic. Authorities in Florida had taken a child from his home there. The month the two were married Biryukova reported him to the police in Redmond for allegedly assaulting her and got a no-contact order; she nevertheless visited him regularly in jail in Issaquah, where he was when she gave birth, under assumed names. Both claimed to investigators they did not live together despite giving them the same address; Biryukova said at one point she did not even know who the father was, even though his name was on the child's birth certificate.

Biryukova's presence on the Internet also aroused interest. On her Facebook page, she had posted many pictures of Maile but almost none of Sky. During the previous months, she had also posted a profile to seekingarrangements.com, a dating website for women seeking "sugar daddies", wealthy men willing to support a younger woman financially as part of a romantic relationship. She sought "financial stability", as well as $3,000–5,000 in cash per month.

No trace of Sky was found in the surrounding neighborhoods. Police said they believed he did not wander away on his own. In the absence of any new information or useful leads, and with Biryukova's account still considered doubtful, theories of Sky's disappearance have assumed his mother's connivance. If he is alive, it is believed that either she let someone else take him that day, or earlier, with Sky's presence in the car an invention. "She concocted that hospital story and when she realized no-one believed it, she hired an attorney," Leslie Clay Berry, Solomon's attorney told the Seattle Weekly in 2013.

Unlike her client, she is doubtful about the outcome of the case. "I don't think he's alive," she said in 2013. "Solomon doesn't like when I say that, but that's what I think." While she believes Biryukova is responsible for his death, she allows that it could have been merely the result of negligence rather than a deliberate act of malice.

The state's Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) removed Maile from Biryukova's home in the wake of her brother's disappearance and placed her into foster care. Solomon was granted twice-weekly visitation while petitioning the court hearing the divorce to grant him custody, which it did after removing the remaining protection order. The divorce was granted in January 2012.

On the morning of November 6, 2011, Sky Elijah Metalwala (born September 6, 2009) of Redmond, Washington, United States, disappeared. Reportedly sick, his mother Julia Biryukova said she put him and his older sister in the car along a Bellevue street to go to a nearby hospital; along the way she stated that she ran out of gas, leaving Sky in the car while she went to get help. She said that when she returned after being gone about an hour and a half, he was gone. He has not been seen since.

These disputes continued for over a year. In November 2011 the court hearing the case ordered the couple into a week of mediation to resolve their issues. The session was reportedly a success, with the two eventually agreeing that Biryukova would have custody of both children while Solomon had full visitation. However, on November 3, shortly after the agreement had been signed, Biryukova called her lawyer and, saying she had felt pressured into the session, decided to void it.

Solomon said he believed that his son was alive, but perhaps not in the U.S. In spring of 2011, after the visit to the doctor that was the last independent record of Sky's presence outside of Biryukova's household, he recalled that her estranged father came from Ukraine to visit her. He wondered to the Weekly if the older man could have taken the boy back to that country with him at the time. But in 2013, he said that he did not know how that could have happened.

On Biryukova's 29th birthday, in early 2010, she was briefly committed to a mental hospital for the first of three times, after telling Solomon she had dreamed of killing the children. There, she was diagnosed with severe obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD); however psychiatrists did not believe that rendered her unfit to parent a child and she would later deny that she had been so diagnosed. Shortly after she got out, her husband filed for divorce.

In September 2010, the court awarded Biryukova full custody of both children. She refused to let them see Solomon, who did not have any visitation rights. He continued to press the issue in court, along with some other issues such as property they both owned. She offered to forego alimony and child support if he let her move to Arizona with the children, but he refused.

Sky was born in 2009; a psychiatrist Biryukova saw prescribed her antidepressants while she was pregnant although she said she did not need them. By then lenders were beginning to foreclose the family's properties and they were in arrears on many of their bills. They had to move out of the Kirkland home and into the smaller Bellevue residence. Solomon claimed in later court papers that at this time, his wife's psychological problems began to manifest themselves, causing him to begin eating outside and sleeping on the floor to comply with her obsession with keeping the condominium clean. The board cited the couple several times for violating noise regulations; at one point they awoke their neighbors with vacuuming after 11 p.m. She, in turn, alleged he became controlling and angry.

Police also soon learned about the 2009 incident where she and Solomon had been arrested after leaving Sky in the car unattended. During the investigation both of them admitted to having left the children by themselves for long periods of time. Detectives would not confirm whether, according to some reports, Biryukova had done so during the lengthy mediation hearing the week before Sky went missing.

Business further declined in the Great Recession that began in 2008. Despite those setbacks, the two bought a home in Kirkland that year for over $800,000, in addition to the mortgage payments they still had to make on their Bellevue residence.

In 2005 Metalwala converted to Christianity; he and his wife began attending a church in Kirkland. Biryukova believed that her in-laws blamed her for this, straining their relationship with her and causing more problems in their marriage. Within two years they were experiencing financial problems as well, when a competing deli opened next to their restaurant, cutting into their earnings. Daughter Maile, their first child, was born in 2007.

Biryukova later told a clinical psychologist she saw that by this point she had learned that her boyfriend could be "very controlling" and she became emotionally dependent on him in turn. Nevertheless, in 2003, she married him in a brief ceremony in his mother's kitchen. Later she said his family gave her the choice of either doing so or never seeing him again, since they claimed he was facing imminent deportation, for reasons that are not known. Biryukova later claimed that she did not tell her family the real reason the two had wed until 2010.

Biryukova says her son woke up sick in their Redmond apartment on the morning of November 6. She has said she put him and his sister in the car she was driving at the time, a silver 1998 two-door Acura Integra, and headed for the Overlake Medical Center in Bellevue. She later stated that around the 2600 block of 112th Street N.E. in that city, a long section of the road that follows a tall concrete noise barrier around the curve of the Washington State Route 520 expressway, just west of its interchange with Interstate 405, she ran out of gas.

Biryukova met her future husband at age 15, in 1997, three years after emigrating from Russia. At that time she was a student at Bellevue High School. Metalwala, then 21, invited her to a party. The two began dating, and she worked at a restaurant his family owned in Seattle's Pioneer Square neighborhood. By 1999, when she finished high school and was naturalized, the couple bought a Bellevue condominium to live in.