By Jessica Brown
Jessica Brown/Scott County Times
Members of the Missouri Valley Search, Rescue and Recovery Team search a body of water near Glagow for clues.
One week after a Glasgow man was reported missing and endangered, crews of volunteer search and rescue teams were deployed in the surrounding rural area in an effort to discover his whereabouts.
On Friday, Jan. 17, Missouri Valley Search and Rescue and Four Rivers K-9 Search, Rescue and Recovery along with a group of local volunteers convened at the Ryder Building in Glasgow in hopes of locating Scott County resident Kenny Gauges. The man was no longer believed to be alive if found, due to frigid temperatures he had likely been exposed to for an extended period of time.
After the search party on Monday, Jan. 13, proved inconclusive, the two search agencies learned about the case. Executive Officer for Field Operations Mike Lawrence with Missouri Valley Search and Rescue said their agency works in conjunction with the Four Rivers K-9 team in events like the one involving Gauges.
He said his agency learned of the Gauges case from an article published in the Jacksonville Journal Courier on Tuesday, Jan. 14, but they often utilize other avenues. “We have various news feeds and alerts to scour the Internet anytime there is a missing person in our region,” Lawrence said. “We respond to any situation within a 100 mile radius of St. Louis.”
Jessica Brown/Scott County Times
A member of the Four Rivers K-9 Search and Rescue Team directs her dog to keep searching.
Lawrence said the Gauges case seemed particularly urgent due to the lack of awareness in rural areas of search and rescue operations. “When we contacted law enforcement here, they had a lot of gratitude because they don’t have resources specializing in wilderness search and rescue.” He added that his team concentrates on rural areas versus metro areas who often have far more resources and searches prove less complicated. “In the city you’re going from structure to structure,” he said, unlike the wilderness where missing persons are much harder to find.
After seeing the Journal-Courier article, Lawrence said he reached out to the Scott County Sheriff’s Department which referred him to the Winchester Police Department, who then contacted him.
As Lawrence said when he debriefed his team when Friday’s search concluded, weather conditions can greatly affect the outcome and cold weather and snow affects scent and visibility.
Scent is especially important when utilizing K-9 search dogs, who are trained to recognize the scent of a deceased person. Early on in Friday’s search, two of the K-9’s involved in the search marked the area around a small body of water about 50 yards from where Gauges’ clothing had been found soon after his disappearance last Friday.
After the team searched the body of water by wading through it, cameras were lowered into it to locate what had looked from a drone image to be an “anomaly”. Despite that and the K-9 team alerting near the area, no clues were found.
Jessica Brown/Scott County Times
One of the vehicles used by the search team.
The rescue teams returned to their hometowns in the St. Louis and Nashville areas Friday evening and do not have plans to return. Lawrence said to his knowledge, local law enforcement has no plans to continue the search for Gauges.
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