Just wanted to send this out to people who may be hiking around Graysen Highlands.
Searchers look for body
Galax Gazette
Volunteers, on- and off-duty police officers and dog handlers from Stokes County, N.C., combed a number of locations near Galax on Monday, searching for the body of a missing 5-year-old boy. Cynthia Lee Davis, 36, reported her son Logan Bowman missing Jan. 26. She said she had not seen her son since Jan. 7, although she has custody of the child.
Police have charged Davis and her boyfriend, Dennis Schemerhorn, 36, both of 77 Sunnybrook Loop, Trailer No. 39, Galax, with felony child endangerment.
About 25 volunteers from Baywood Search and Rescue, Carroll County Search and Rescue and law enforcement agencies met at 9 a.m. at Mountain View Park to help with the search.
There, blaze orange rescue squad jackets mingled with camouflage, grey rescue squad uniform shirts and the dark brown of deputy uniforms as the small crowd gathered in the gradually warming morning sun.
Bonnie Turman of Dugspur Rescue Squad moved through the group, getting volunteers to sign their names so that they all can be accounted for at the end of the day.
One alert officer sees the two Suburbans carrying the North Carolina search dogs speed by on U.S. 58 to the south of the park and radios go into action to get the dog handlers turned in the right direction.
Investigator Glenn Hyatt of the Grayson Sheriff’s Department calls out, “Has everybody got rubber gloves?” - and boxes circulate among the searchers.
Back to the dogs - “What’s the name of this park?” he asks, and repeats “Mountain View” into his radio. “Everybody get two pair. You’ll probably use more than one pair today.”
Hyatt and Turman discuss radio frequencies and how the searchers will communicate. “We can talk to Grayson County,” a Dugspur member says.
Two Suburbans, one reading “Care Trak” and another reading simply K-9 Unit pull in to the park. These three dogs from Stokes County are trained to detect dead bodies.
As Hyatt hands out flyers with Bowman’s picture and vital statistics, he gives the searchers the grim news. “I feel like we’re gonna be looking for a dead body today. I hope there’s a chance that we find somebody alive, but the chances are slim.”
The searchers will examine areas near Sherwood Trailer Park, where Bowman lived with his mother and Schemerhorn, a location on Stockyard Road where some of their friends lived, a place on the New River where they sometimes partied, and a huge expanse of Iron Ridge.
Hyatt instructs searchers to tear open any trash bag they find and examine the contents (hence the gloves). "If you find anything that looks like human remains, back off. It’s a crime scene.
“We’re gonna find deer bones everywhere. We’ve done had one scare from deer bones already. As cold as the weather is, I think we’ll find more than bones.”
Hyatt and Arthur Cox of the Virginia Division of Forestry caution the searchers about the dangers of Iron Ridge.
“Is there anybody that’s ever been to the main shaft out there - the big shaft?” Cox asks.
A couple of hands go up.
He cautions the searchers not to go near the edge, because thawing ground could collapse. “Just be careful where you step.”
Water in the mine is 75 percent acid, and “there’s holes in there you could put Galax in.”
Cox says a body thrown in the shaft would not go to the bottom, but would hang on the rocks and ledges.
Hyatt says he went over the area briefly Saturday. “It’s unbelievable how massive a land area it is.”
Four-wheelers will roll through the area slowly and searchers will follow on foot.
“There was tracks all through there,” Hyatt says in answer to one searcher’s question. “But the time he’s been missing has been 21 days.”
He tells the group that the boy only weighs 30 pounds. "You’ll probably have to get down there and look in some places.
“You’re going to find trash bags - I think that’s the deer dumping capital of the world out there. But if you have any doubt about anything, get ahold of somebody.”
He dispatches Carroll Deputy J.B. Gardner and a couple of searchers to Fowler’s Ferry, where Davis and Schemerhorn used to “go and swim and party.”
“Don’t get far apart from each other,” he tells the remaining searchers. "Stay close.
“People, we’re looking for a needle in a haystack. Please remember, if you find something, it’s a crime scene.”
The searchers spend much of the next hour watching the dogs work, the handlers guiding them across the ground to be searched. Over brush piles. Around abandoned buildings. Among the trailers at Sherwood Trailer Park.
When the dogs finish, the humans get to work - a long, frustrating day of looking for a boy who can’t be found.
Grayson Sheriff Jerry Wilson said Tuesday that the searchers did not locate the child, and “we’re out of places to search.”
hippie hiker chic