CHURCH HILL, Tenn. (WJHL)- It’s been more than four weeks since five-year-old Summer Wells was last seen at her home on Ben Hill Road in the Beech Creek Community of Hawkins County. “Th…
www.wreg.com
Incident Commander of Search for Summer Wells: ‘There’s been very limited ground searching since the scaling back’
It’s been more than four weeks since
five-year-old Summer Wells was last seen at her home on Ben Hill Road in the Beech Creek Community of Hawkins County.
“There’s been very limited ground searching since the
scaling back,” said the incident commander of search operations, Captain Tim Coup. “Right now, in essence, pretty much all we’re going off of is anything credible, credible leads, credible information.”
“You may not see the big fancy command vehicles, you may not see the 1,194 people trudging around in Beech Creek but we are – the Sheriff’s department, law enforcement, the TBI – is still following up on leads,” Coup said. “Even if it is a ground that has already been searched one, two, multiple times. Being in contact with TBI, Hawkins County Sheriff’s Department, something they feel as though needs to be a credible search, need to go back in and look over things again, we’re right there with them hand-in-hand doing those things.”
“Any credible lead that they have to ‘Hey, we need to go out here and search this area.’ We will,” said Coup. “I will have a team whether I have to call in a team from out of state, we will have somebody there to search those areas.”
“Once everybody leaves over there, it’s a 20-minute drive from Beech Creek back to [The Church Hill Rescue Squad.] It takes a lot of time to think, go home, go to bed, wake up in the middle of the night thinking ‘Well, did I search that area, did I search it well enough, did I send enough people in? Are there places that I missed?'” he said. “The simple fact of the family and other rescuers and everything is there has been no outcome. As search operations, we know no more than we did the night she went missing, so that alone psychologically, some of these searchers are [thinking] ‘I put in all this time and I wasn’t able to provide anything.'”