The search for a pair of Newton County fugitives accused of child molestation has been scaled back, authorities said Friday.
Newton County Sheriff’s deputies will focus more on investigating allegations that Donald Mac Brown and David Wesley Crawford sexually assaulted a 5-year-old girl sometime last month, sheriff’s spokeswoman Deputy Cortney Morrison told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The full-scale manhunt that began Wednesday and included several dozen officers from the U.S. Marshals Service and the Southeast Regional Fugitives Task Force will remain on hold as investigators with the sheriff’s agency look for more clues that could lead to the duo’s whereabouts, Morrison said.
Meanwhile, Brown and Crawford, considered by law officials to be avid outdoorsmen, remain at large somewhere in the hundreds of square miles of Newton County’s woods, authorities said.
Both men are considered armed and dangerous.
Brown, 36, was in police custody just last week, after an arrest for soliciting sex from an adult on Nov. 28.
But he bonded out of the Rockdale County jail in Conyers before Conyers Police and federal authorities tracking him could get an arrest warrant on child exploitation charges after a cell phone belonging to Brown was discovered to contain child pornography, police said.
“He has made the statement that he is not going back to jail,” Morrison said Thursday, pointing to communications Brown had made with family members.
Both men have criminal records, authorities said, although details were limited into their backgrounds on Friday.
Conyers police Lt. Jackie Dunn told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that Crawford, 54, had “a violent criminal history.”
In addition to child molestation, both men are being charged in Newton County with enticing a child for indecent purposes and solicitation of sodomy.
Crawford is described as a 5-foot-5, 135-pound balding white man with blue eyes and gray hair on the sides of his head.
Brown is about 6-feet tall, weighing 245 pounds with brown hair and blue eyes.
They were last seen in a white 1999 Ford F-150 pickup truck with Georgia license tag BZW9023.
Anyone with information about Brown’s or Crawford’s whereabouts is asked to call the Newton County Sheriff’s Office at 770-784-2100, Crime Stoppers Atlanta at 404-577-TIPS (8477) or to the Fugitive Task Force at 770-508-2500.
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