A little recap and a bit more on the PI.
Serenity Dennard is a 9-year-old South Dakota girl who has been missing since 2019, and whose family has hired a firm of former FBI agents to restart the search for her.
heavy.com
Serenity Dennard: Missing 9-Year-Old’s Family Hires Retired FBI to Find Her
Serenity Dennard is a 9-year-old
South Dakota girl who disappeared on February 3, 2019, and was the subject of one of the most extensive
missing persons searches in the state’s history.
This week, her adoptive parents, Chad Dennard and Darcie Gentry, have revived the search, hiring a private investigation firm made up of FBI and police veterans in hope of finally tracking their daughter down.
Doug Kouns, a retired FBI agent with Veracity IIR, the Indiana-based firm hired by Serenity’s parents, gave Heavy an overview of his strategy in the fresh search for the girl on Thursday, but acknowledged that “the odds are not with us on this one.”
1. Serenity Disappeared From the Black Hills Children’s Home in February 2019; 2 Employees Who Were Watching Her at the Time Were Later Fired
Two of the facility’s employees were later fired after Serenity’s disappearance, the
Argus Leader reported.
A grandmother and her granddaughter were dropping off another child at the time and spotted Serenity running off; the grandmother alerted staff at the children’s home while her granddaughter stayed in the car and watched Serenity disappear into the trees, SD News Watch reported. This was the last confirmed sighting of Serenity.
2. The Search for Serenity Went on for Months, Spanning 4,500 Miles of Rough, Wooded Terrain & Involving 1,200 People
The mass effort to find the girl would sprawl into one of the most exhaustive missing persons searches in South Dakota history, a
local NBC affiliate reported in August 2019. More than 1,000 people from 60 different agencies participated in those first six months, the outlet reported.
By January 2020, the search effort slowed, but ended up covering 4,500 miles of rough terrain, with more than 220 leads exhausted and 465 interviews conducted, SD News Watch reported.
3. Law Enforcement & Doctors Expressed Doubt About Serenity’s Chances for Survival Alone in the South Dakota Winter; Cadaver Dogs Have Picked Up Scents, but Have Found No Remains
Pennington County Sheriff Kevin Thom
told the Rapid City Journal in February, one year after Serenity’s disappearance, that the girl’s small size and the chill of the region’s winters made the searchers fear for the worst, although many had still not given up.
“In terms of Serenity specifically, she’s very small, she’s 4-foot-9, roughly 90-some pounds, so if she’s in the woods and got lost, at the point you’re becoming hypothermic, there’s the potential that you find a spot to curl up to get warm, under a rock ledge or next to a log,” he told the outlet.
4. Serenity’s Adoptive Parents Still Have Not Lost All Hope & Last Week Reached Out to the Retired FBI Agents at Veracity IIR to Restart the Search
Dennard and Gentry, Serenity’s adoptive parents, have since divorced, but both continued to feel strongly that Serenity may yet be found, the
Argus Leader reported.
“As far as what I think happened, it changes every day,” Dennard told the outlet in February. “But I think she’s out there; I truly don’t think somebody picked her up. I think she liked to run and she wouldn’t run very far, but she liked to see people looking for her. I think she watched people look for her and I think she went too far and got lost. That’s just Serenity, and she had done that before.”
5. Doug Kouns, a Retired FBI Agent & CEO of Veracity IIR, Told Heavy the Odds ‘Aren’t Good,’ but They Are Gearing Up for an Extensive Re-Investigation
Kouns told Heavy on Thursday that his investigators are still brushing up on the circumstances of Serenity’s disappearance — “We’re kind of in sponge mode,” he said.
The case is “pretty cold,” but investigators have an extensive plan in place, based on cycles of intelligence and new or redone interviews.
“We’ll do as much research as we can,” Kouns said. “We’ll look for gaps and peopke that we think we might want to interview again. We’ll reach out to the investigators who worked on this already and hopefully they’ll be cooperative and share with us what they’ve done, maybe some insights that haven’t been made public.”
Kouns says he believes Veracity IIR will be the first private investigation firm to take on Serenity’s case.
“We’ll use the principles we used to use at the FBI,” he said. “Let the facts guide our investigation and use the intl cycle to figure out what questions need to be answered and how they’ll be answered. We’ll collect our intel, process it and analyze it, then produce a set of more detailed questions, just fine-tuning it each time around.”
As for the odds of finding Serenity alive?
“I have to be realistic: The odds are not with us on this one,” Kouns said. “The longer it goes, it just gets much worse. I hate to be pessimistic, but the statistics would say the odds aren’t good.”
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