The search for missing Toronto teen Mariam Makhniashvili will go door-to-door Monday afternoon as police execute a detailed plan to canvass the area where the girl was last seen.
About 60 police officers from 53 Division started the process knocking on thousands of doors in hopes of finding new leads in the search for the girl, police said at a news conference. They called the massive effort "unprecedented."
The canvass will be done by plainclothes officers over the next two or three weeks. They will work seven days a week, 12 hours a day, said Det. Sgt. Dan Nealon.
The police are re-establishing a command post in the area.
"What we're going to be doing with the investigators is having an intensive, investigative canvass in the area where Mariam lived and went to school," he said.
He also asked for the public's co-operation.
"You will expect a knock at your door and police will keep knocking on your door until they can identify that you are there," he said. "We're also going to be asking to be invited inside your home to take a quick peek inside to ensure that there is no evidence in relation to this case with respect to you."
Martin O'Carrigan he had no problem with letting police officers into his apartment. "Well I don't know why they would say no, because if it's to try to find a girl, why would you say no if you had nothing to hide?" he asked.
Mariam has been missing for nearly two months and police have had few leads in the case.
One resident told reporters she once saw Mariam in the 20 Shallmar Blvd. building's elevators and thought the girl looked distressed weeks before she vanished. "And I asked her, 'is something wrong' ... and she didn't answer me," said Muriel Levine.
The girl, who turned 18 in October, went missing Sept. 14 after walking to Forest Hill Collegiate -- a high school in the Bathurst Street and Eglinton Avenue area --with her brother. When they arrived, she told her brother she would be going into the school from a separate entrance but Mariam never made it to class and hasn't been seen since.
Last week, Ontario Provincial Police helped with the search by deploying their helicopter over the grounds of several parks in the area. Police say nothing of interest was found in the search.
Last month police also seized dozens of computers from several public libraries in the area that were believed to have been used by the girl in the days before she went missing.
The only solid clue investigators have so far is the girl's school bag which was found about a month after Mariam went missing. It was found in an alleyway behind a building on Eglinton Avenue near Yonge Street, a few kilometres east from where she was last seen.
To help jog people's memories, police have released an image of Mariam with the clothes she was wearing on Sept. 14 digitally added.
With a report from CTV Toronto's John Musselman
