Divers assist with search for Blairsville woman

By Rhonda Cook and Alexis Stevens

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A team of divers from Hall County joined the search Saturday for Kristi Cornwell.

Police say Cornwell, a former probation officer, was abducted Tuesday while on an evening walk along a little-traveled road near Blairsville. At the time, she was near her parents’ house and on her cell phone, telling her boyfriend in Atlanta that a car was following her.

Douglas Davis, the boyfriend, called the Union County Sheriff’s Office around 9:20 p.m. to report that he heard a struggle and Cornwell’s cries for help.

As the search reached a fifth day, family and friends tried to keep their hopes up.

Richard Cornwell was told of his sister’s apparent abduction around 10 p.m. Tuesday. Driving from Knoxville, he reached his parents’ home in Blairsville around 1:30 a.m. Wednesday.

When he arrived, Richard Cornwell walked up and down the rural road from where his sister was taken, calling her name in the dark, even as law enforcement began the official search.

It was the only thing he could think to do.

“I started searching myself when I got here,” Richard Cornwell said Saturday from his makeshift “command center” in his parents’ unfinished basement.

The 32-year-old civil engineer said he is living on coffee and doughnuts and taking care of his mother while his father stays at the law enforcement command center for the search for Kristi Cornwell. Family and friends, many of them bringing food, are in and out of the house, he said.

Richard Cornwell said he took it as a good sign Friday when a homeowner, while cutting the grass, found his 38-year-old sister’s discarded cell phone.

“They know the direction of travel,” Richard Cornwell said. “It’s comforting to know they did not find the cell phone at the end of some abandoned road. It was [found] on a state route. I got positive feelings because of that. Rather than go into some nearby secluded location in the forest, I feel positive that maybe they’re [his sister and abductors] still on the road somewhere.

“We know the direction of travel so we can shift the focus of the searching and start looking at counties to the north. ”

Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Vernon Keenan said Saturday the search had expanded to the area where the phone was found on Nottely Dam Road, about 3 1/2 miles from where Kristi Cornwell was taken Tuesday.

Divers were searching near a bridge on Pat Colwell Road, GBI spokesman John Bankhead said Saturday evening. The dive team will likely continue its efforts Sunday, he said.

About 100 law enforcement officers from 17 agencies and several German Shepherds, bloodhounds and other search dogs went out again Saturday morning, Keenan said.

By then, virtually every registered sex offender in Union, Towns, Gilmer and Lumpkin Counties had been questioned. Keenan said Department of Probation officers who conducted those interviews learned nothing to help find Kristi Cornwell.

“We’re checking into her professional life when she was a probation officer for couple years and reviewing every case that she supervised,” Keenan said.

Kristi Cornwell resigned that job in 2002 to go to school full time. She had an apartment in Dalton, where she was studying, but also lived with her parents.

“She walked in evening [exercise] at no particular time,” Keenan said. “We’ve not focused on a suspect and the victim has not been found.”

Keenan noted that when law enforcement officers swarmed the same area in January 2008 looking for hiker Meredith Emerson they knew soon after they started who they suspected. Many of the investigators who looked for Emerson are now looking for Kristi Cornwell, Keenan said.

Emerson was found on Jan. 4, 2008, in some woods in Dawson County. Gary Michael Hilton took investigators there in exchange for a prosecutor’s assurances that he would not seek the death penalty. Hilton pleaded guilty to murdering Emerson and he is now in Florida where he is awaiting a death penalty trial for a woman’s death there.

As searchers were looking for Kristi Cornwell on Saturday, Emerson’s friends were holding an already-scheduled memorial walk in Blairsville.

Unlike Emerson’s case, Keenan said investigators have little to go on in their search for Kristi Cornwell.

Some of Kristi Cornwell’s personal items also were found along Jones Creek Road, where she was walking. Witnesses reported two suspicious vehicles in the area at the time.

Richard Cornwell said someone, a stranger to the family, had offered money for a reward. He declined to say how much because the details are pending.

Meanwhile, one of Cornwell’s friends has created a group on the social networking Web site Facebook for those hoping for the safe return of the mother of a 15-year-old son. Almost 2,000 people had joined the group Saturday evening, offering their prayers and wishes for Kristi Cornwell’s safe return.

“Please Jesus,” one poster wrote, “Be with her and her family.”