In the 60 hours after they were called to search for Jorelys Rivera, Canton police did not find the blood-smeared apartment where she died, even though it was less than 100 yards from where she was last seen. At one point during that time, police suspended their search overnight, official investigative logs show.
The Canton police chief also declined to call in the state’s Child Abduction Response Team, which pulls from nine state law enforcement agencies with different specialties. Once the team was called — by the Cherokee County sheriff rather than the Canton police — it took just four hours to locate the crime scene and another two hours to find Jorelys’ body in a nearby trash compactor .
All those facts are suggestive of a small police department, overwhelmed by an investigation beyond its resources yet reluctant to cede authority to larger and better-trained agencies, according to current and former law enforcement officials.
If a missing child is not located within the first few hours of a search, “you bring all resources to bear,” said Mark Safarik, a former FBI profiler and executive director of Forensic Behavioral Services in Virginia.
Canton Police Chief Jeff Lance did not respond to a detailed email Friday seeking comment on how his department, which has about 40 certified peace officers, conducted its investigation. Earlier Friday, the department issued a statement saying it would no longer comment on the case in order to safeguard the prosecution of Ryan Brunn, the man charged in Jorelys Rivera’s death.
Friday at dusk, several hundred people gathered at a park in Canton to light candles in memory of Jorelys. Noses red with cold and eyes red with tears, they wrote words of commemoration on a board provided for that purpose and listened to speakers lift up the importance of community. All the speakers’ remarks were translated into Spanish.
Steven Imbriano, 25, came with his girlfriend, Kaitlyn Jones, 21. “We want people to know that this is a community that won’t tolerate such actions. We want to support this family,” he said.
As he spoke, Jones wrote on the board: “R.I.P., sweet angel.”
Clutching a candle, 48-year-old Matty Stephenson said the tragedy hit all too close to home: She once lived in the River Ridge complex where Jorelys was sexually assaulted and killed. “When she was found, it hit me very bad,” Stephenson said. “I have an 11-year-old daughter. If something like this happened to my daughter, I’d be going crazy.”
Police believe Brunn — a maintenance worker at the apartment complex — abducted Jorelys around 5:30 p.m. on Dec. 2 and raped and killed her in the vacant apartment before moving her body to the trash compactor . According to the autopsy results, she died within the first couple of hours — perhaps even before the police were called around 7:20 p.m.
There is probably nothing police could have done to save her. But more effective police work might have led to a suspect sooner than five days after the slaying.
Safarik and other experts emphasized that they can’t know what local police faced or exactly what they did. But they said some aspects of the investigation raise issues that should be addressed.
For instance, local police did not search the trash container that held the body, and the waste disposal company was on the verge of hauling it off Monday when members of the state task force intervened.
Ken Lanning, an expert on crimes against children and a former member of the FBI’s behavioral science unit, cautioned against judging any investigation from the outside. “Hindsight is 20/20,” he said. “As you look back at any of these things after the fact, it’s easy to say, ‘Why didn’t you do this?’”
Even so, Lanning said he was surprised that the trash container in which Jorelys’ body was found was not searched sooner. “If it’s an apartment complex and there’s a Dumpster, the Dumpster should’ve been searched,” he said.
Canton police did involve other local agencies in the search. The sheriff’s office, which has more than 200 deputies and investigators who handle criminal cases, served in a support role. And Canton’s Fire and Rescue provided searchers. The state patrol lent a helicopter.
But the police department retained control and directed the investigation. And on some key questions, the department’s official investigative log, obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution under the Georgia Open Records Act, raises more questions than it answers.
For instance, the log says that on Dec. 3, the day after Jorelys vanished, police searched the River Ridge complex, building by building. That afternoon, it says, officers were specifically “checking all vacant apts at river ridge.”
About 10 percent of the 356 units are vacant, according to the property manager.
According to state investigators, there was no mistaking that something ghastly had happened in one particular unit; there was blood everywhere — on the walls as well as the floor.
Yet, police did not find that scene, which was determined Monday to be the place where Jorelys had been beaten and stabbed.
And the log shows that at 6:18 p.m. the operation was “wrapping up and terminating.”
Safarik called that a misstep. “If you have not found the child you do not shut down the investigation. You work ’round the clock,” he said.
In an email responding to questions earlier this week, Lance, the Canton chief, specified that his officers worked through the night Dec. 2 — the first night — but he did not address the night of Dec. 3.
He insisted that his force aggressively looked for Jorelys, first on the theory that she had simply wandered off and then, sometime the day after she vanished, reclassifying the case as a likely abduction.
In fact, the vast majority of children who go missing do so on their own two feet and later turn up unharmed. Still, Lanning said, “the younger the child is, the stronger the consideration you have to give to the possibility the child was abducted.”
By Dec. 4, two days after the disappearance, Lance said in his earlier email, “our resources were getting drained and our leads were not coming in as we would have liked them to — so I made the decision to call for additional investigative resources ...”
Whoever was responsible for the decision, late that afternoon Sheriff Roger Garrison made the call, and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation activated the statewide team.
Staff writers Katie Leslie and Craig Schneider contributed to this article.
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