The exact circumstances of Rosenblum's death remain disputed, with his father Maurice alleging foul play on the part of the Baldwin Borough Police Department (BBPD).

[1] The case elicited local and national media attention, including an extensive investigation by Pittsburgh Magazine in 1988 which resulted in a libel suit by two Baldwin police officers.

He woke up with some residual effects from drugs he had taken the night before; Sharer took him to a local hospital at 10 a.m., urging him to check himself in as his eyes appeared to be regularly rolling back in his head.

[1] Within an hour Sharer's Sunbird was reported as abandoned in the westbound lane of East Carson Street, a stretch of Pennsylvania Route 837 between two sets of railroad tracks along the south bank of the Monongahela River below a wooded bluff in a discontinuous, uninhabited section of Baldwin a quarter-mile (400 m) west of the Glenwood Bridge.

The interior of the car was filled with assorted items, including hundreds of photographs, to the extent that Weber gave up searching its contents shortly after he started.

[5] While Maurice believed he would return within a day or two or call within that time, Barbara immediately feared Michael had been harmed, noting that it was uncharacteristic of him to not notify them of his plans beforehand.

Searchers, largely drawn from the borough's volunteer fire department and the county police, spent three hours looking over a very small area in the immediate vicinity, between the road and the river.

[8] In mid-July, Heckmann called Barbara Rosenblum one morning to let her know that the Baldwin police were issuing an arrest warrant for Michael for the robbery and she would be writing a story about that aspect of the case.

Rocco was able to find a suspect who more accurately fit the description and had a similar car in the Butler jail north of Pittsburgh; he eventually confessed to the robbery.

Maurice followed up with classified ads in the newspapers urging them to take their information to the proper authorities and claim the reward money, but that never happened.

[4] Maurice Rosenblum lobbied for other law enforcement agencies at higher levels of government to look into both his son's disappearance (and, he had come to believe, death) and the Baldwin police's handling of it.

"[6] In December 1986, the Rosenblums received another anonymous tip that yielded information which confirmed Maurice's view that the Baldwin police had been actively obstructing the investigation of their son's disappearance.

A letter signed by "A Concerned Friend" sent to their home told them this, and suggested they would find proof if they spoke to Margaret Haslett, a former state trooper who had worked as a dispatcher for the Baldwin police after retiring.

She had been at work, and saw the chief order Fred Cappelli, the department's clerk, to type up a letter to Sharer saying that her car had been recovered, backdate it to February 15, and put it in the file to allow the police to claim it had been sent.

[6] As soon as he returned to Pittsburgh, Maurice contacted a longtime friend, state Rep. K. Leroy Irvis, Speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, and told him what he had learned.

An investigator told him early on that it seemed to him that Gaburri had lied; later it seemed that there were other criminal activities related to the Baldwin police and that a grand jury would be hearing testimony.

[6] In July 1987, before the state investigation had been dropped, Maurice wrote to Baldwin's borough council, outlining what he knew and what he suspected about Gaburri's role in his son's disappearance and likely death.

He asked the village solicitor, John Luke, a law partner of Mayor McPherson, a close Gaburri ally, to open an independent investigation.

Luke took depositions from Cappelli, who admitted everything he had been accused of but denied Gaburri's role, and George Galovich, another Baldwin officer who had been suspected of writing the letter to the Rosenblums.

Tercsak came to believe that Michael Rosenblum had, as he had done on other occasions, fled when police attempted to pull him over, to the point that they might have responded by running the Sunbird off the road.

Haslett repeated her account; Cappelli's testimony departed from his deposition by returning to what he had originally told Guerra, that he had done only what he admitted doing because the chief had ordered him to.

A concurrent 60-day suspension addressed an issue unrelated to the Rosenblum case, Galovich's alleged failure to follow up on a report of stolen checks that had been assigned to him.

[11][c] The coverage in Pittsburgh-area newspapers was augmented in the late 1980s by a lengthy article on the case in Pittsburgh Magazine and a segment on the nationally syndicated Unsolved Mysteries television show.

[5][8] Dobson, who had been working dispatch on February 14, 1980, said that in addition to Morse, Lombardi, and Weber, all known to have been on River Road at midday, his radio logs showed that Cooley and Miscenik probably were as well.

Cooley, at the time facing a civil suit from two residents alleging he had attempted to extort money from them, refused to talk to Pittsburgh Magazine on the advice of his lawyers.

They alleged the story contained false statements and recklessly implicated them in Rosenblum's disappearance,[14] and that Harger personally had defamed them in a radio interview about it.

A year after his September 1988 retirement, Gaburri sued the magazine and Harger as well; he dropped Maurice Rosenblum as a defendant shortly after filing the suit although he expected to consider calling him as a witness.

[15] The NBC television network went ahead with filming its segment, which included interviews with both Maurice and Barbara Rosenblum, Tercsak, Haslett, Cappelli, and Thomas McFall of the borough's civil service commission, and re-enactments of events such as the discovery of the Sunbird on the stretch of River Road.

He recalled that Michael had also been held in lock-up and had a gunshot wound to his leg and other injuries suggesting a beating; later officers came and took him to what the caller presumed would be a hospital.

In June the county coroner's office confirmed it was Michael Rosenblum's, after finding it matched the unique sinus print of head X-rays taken during his lifetime.