Hunt for missing autistic teenager Sebastian Rogers has covered at least 10,000 miles, investigators reveal
Investigators looking for Sebastian Rogers in Tennessee said on Tuesday that they had covered somewhere between 10,000 and 12,000 miles in the past four weeks.
In a report for News Channel 5, Ken Weidner, the director of Sumner County’s Emergency Operations Centre, showed a map of the areas searched so far.
From ponds to homes to woodland, hundreds of people have been scouring the area around where the 15-year-old vanished from four weeks ago.
“We’ve had close to 1,500 searchers,” Mr Weidner told reporter Nick Beres. “We’ve got 1,350 documented and then we have additional people, I’m sure we have got more on the public safety side.
“The first two days, we logged 2,000 search miles and we haven’t had enough time to extrapolate all of this,” he said, referring to the data on a huge screen.
“It’s probably going to be 10-12,000 miles searched.”
Mr Weidner said that despite all the door-knocking, interviews and searches, there has been no sign of Sebastian so far.
The autistic teenager disappeared overnight between 25 and 26 February from his home in Hendersonville. His mother found his bedroom empty when she went to wake him for school.
Mr Weidner said they were not giving up hope of finding the boy alive.
“We’re not stopping, we’re working on leads and information from TBI and the sheriff’s office and we’ve got teams on standby ready to go right now,” Mr Weidner added.
The interview comes after law enforcement appeared to scale back their public efforts to find Sebastian.
Meanwhile, volunteer searches have been organised, while Sebastian’s father Seth Rogers has said he has been searching every day for his boy.
His mother, Katie Proudfoot, and stepfather, Chris Proudfoot, have recently left the family home so that Mr Proudfoot can return to work.
In a separate interview on Monday, the mother said her son could be anywhere and that she would continue to look for him.