Comer Police Chief Dennis Bell said he has a strong lead for the suspect who stole and dumped a pickup truck that was found in a flooded quarry in Oglethorpe County.
The stolen truck was recovered from the quarry on Allgood Road on Jan. 6 after a quarry worker notified the Oglethorpe County Sheriff’s Office about tire tracks at the edge of the quarry. The report was made around 9:30 a.m.
“We do have a lead, and it's a strong one, so we'll continue to work together,” Bell said Monday. “I appreciate the Sheriff's Office for working with us because we could have never found it without their help.”
The responding deputies felt there was a good chance a vehicle was in the quarry. Deputies requested assistance from the Elbert County Water Response and Rescue team, Elbert County EMA and Elbert County EMS, and they arrived at the scene with their equipment within 90 minutes, Oglethorpe County Sheriff David Gabriel said.
The dive team used an underwater drone to locate the vehicle in 18 feet of water. Gabriel said it was a “matter of minutes” before the drone found the vehicle.
Seymour’s Wrecker Service responded with a large rotary boom truck. Members of the Elbert County dive team hooked up the truck and pulled it from the water.
Gabriel and Bell, a former investigator with the State Insurance Commission, searched the truck for evidence.
“We recovered the vehicle, No. 1,” Gabriel said. “You always want to make sure that it doesn’t have a body in it. That's the most pressing thing. If it has a dead body, then it's a whole different issue. Once it's recovered, you have to look at how it was situated and if it was dumped on purpose or accidental, or it might have been insurance fraud or something because you run into that a lot.”
The tag matched to a stolen truck that was reported stolen to the Comer Police Department on Jan. 1.
“We put it on the Georgia Crime Investigation Center so everyone would know,” Bell said. “We had looked all over the place for where we thought it may be. When it popped up over there, our flags were already up. That pretty much put the icing on the cake.”