Huge Search Finds No Trace of Missing Teen

100 volunteers joined search for Jaymee Closs clues
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Oct 19, 2018 1:37 AM CDT
Big Search for Missing Teen Yields Nothing
A group of volunteers searched the ditches along highway 8, Thursday, Oct. 18, 2018, in Barron, Wis., near the home where 13-year-old Jayme Closs lived with her parents James and Denise.   (Jerry Holt /Star Tribune via AP)

Plenty of people answered the call when Barron County Sheriff Chris Fitzgerald asked for 100 able-bodied volunteers to search for "missing and endangered" teen Jayme Closs on Thursday—but the search along a 14-mile stretch of Highway 8 near Barron, Wis., didn't find anything that could provide a breakthrough. The sheriff's office said in a Facebook post that "nothing of evidentiary value" was found, though they have received more than 800 tips, CNN reports. Closs, 13, has been the focus of an intensive search since early Monday, when her parents were found shot to death in their home minutes after a cryptic 911 call was placed.

The town of Barron, which has fewer than 3,500 people, has been deeply shaken by the murders and the disappearance, reports the Wausau Daily Herald. Police have said they don't know whether it was a random attack or a targeted one. "We don’t know anything and that’s hard," says Barron resident Cyndi Bragg. She says the community is "stuck in limbo" while the search continues—and she has told her own children to be extremely cautious. Fitzgerald has said he has a "100% expectation that she's alive," though there have been no credible sightings confirmed since her disappearance. The sheriff's office says Jaymee is 5 feet tall and 100 pounds, with strawberry-blond hair and green eyes. (The sheriff believes Jaymee was home when her parents were killed.)

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