Orange Park, Florida – On Monday afternoon, Somer Thompson, 7, was walking home from Grove Park Elementary with a group of kids that included her twin brother and 10-year-old sister. After getting into an argument with some of the group, she began running home. She has not been seen since. An Amber Alert has since been issued. Thompson is white, 3 feet 5 inches tall and weighs 65 pounds. She has brown hair that was in a pony tail and was wearing a cranberry colored jumpsuit with pink stripes and a black T-shirt underneath. Her backpack is black with pink and white skulls and crossbones. “This is an all-out search,” Sgt. Dan Mahla, of the Clay County Sheriff’s Department said at a news conference Tuesday afternoon. “We are going to keep trying and trying and trying. We have all these resources and we are maximizing them to the max. “She is an endangered missing child. We do suspect foul play.””
To make matters even worse, one week ago there was a failed abduction attempt in this area. A 5-year-old-girl was approached by a Hispanic woman driving a blue sedan with two Hispanic males. She told the little girl that her mother had instructed her to get in the car. The little girl refused and got upset, attracting the attention of a neighbor who intervened.
Here is a mini time-line from what I have gleaned from the online reports:
Monday 2:45 p.m – Walking the mile walk home ahead of other kids
Monday 3:05 p.m – Siblings arrive home to find sister not there. Somer’s mother’s boyfriend begins walking the neighborhood
Monday 4:00 p.m. – Mother calls home to check on kids, immediately calls authorities
Tuesday 9 a.m. – Amber Alert
Tuesday All Day- 100 Clay County deputies, law enforcement officers from neighboring counties, the FBI and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement scoured a residential Orange Park neighborhood began scouring the area using helicopters, horses and dogs. 57 sex offenders have been interviewed within a 3-mile radius, and their homes and yards have been searched. The search was expanded Tuesday to a 5-mile radius, and officials say they will interview 30 more registered sex offenders.
Tuesday 7:30 p.m. – Candlelight Vigil held
Here is some heart-breaking video from showing Somer’s mother as she relays the last time she saw Somer – and laments on whether she told Somer she loved her or not.
Also, here is the walk they took. I took a Google Streets Stroll down that path and it is VERY residential with a lot of places for her to go off the path if she were mad at her sister. There is the possibility that she was never ahead of them for long, maybe even hiding and letting them get in front of her. She also had to walk past a ball park of some type where strangers to the neighborhood could go unnoticed.
Update
Like a lot of people had already been thinking, this missing person story will not end well. The body of a small child has been found in the Chesser Island Road Landfill in Flokstin, Ga. This particular landfill is the end of the route for trucks collecting trash in Somer’s hometown of Orange Park, FL. Police have not confirmed that the body is Somer’s, but what would be the odds of it being another child?
Update 10/22 – Clay County Sheriff Rick Beseler states that investigators have identified the body of Somer Thompson. An autopsy, scheduled to be performed today at the Medical Examiner’s office in Savannah, should help determine a cause of death.
Update 10-22-09 – Guess where she was last seen? 1080 Gano, an abandoned house right across the street from the park. (Map)
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