NewsWest 9
COLORADO CITY - It has been more than six months since 13-year-old Hailey Dunn went missing and there still is no sign of her. Now, volunteer search teams have decided to call off the search. NewsWest 9 talked to one of the members of the team and she said it was a very difficult decision to make.
Hailey Dunn went missing on December 27, 2010. As soon as Colorado City and the surrounding communities heard her story, they all wanted to help and bring the girl home. Search teams gathered in Colorado City daily to look for her but found nothing. Over time, fewer and fewer people began to show up to look for Hailey.
"We started off with 300 plus searchers and now we are down to less than 10," Volunteer, Holly Jenkins, said.
The Hope for Hailey search team kept going week after week but it got harder and harder for them to be the only ones searching.
"Financially it's hard to make that drive and once you get there, you're driving, we're spending our savings account. All of our extra money is going to gas. As for walking, the ground it's just hard to get there," Jenkins said.
Even though some may say the group is giving up, they say they are not.
"Nobody is giving up on her, nobody is stopping. Simple science tells you after six months if you're walking and they tell us to look for overturned dirt, well after six months you don't really know what overturned dirt was six months ago. You don't really know what you're looking for anymore," Jenkins said.
When Billie Dunn, Hailey's mom, heard that the group was not going to look for her daughter every week, Billie became upset and disappointed.
"She thought we were giving up. She was hurt, she feels that some people are giving up. I actually got a text from her this morning and it said tell them that we are going to look for Hailey everywhere. I'm not going to give up on her and I'm not going to believe any theories until we find her," Jenkins said.
For now, the search teams will only go out when they have enough people to look.
"What we do is there is a group of people and we just communicate with each other when we can go and when we can't go. If there is people from other towns that want to search and have a friend with them, they can contact one of us and we will join them. As far as a scheduled search every Saturday, our numbers were getting so low when you have so much land to cover in West Texas it's hard to do it with just a few people," Jenkins said.
