A body found in Texas has been identified as a woman who went missing weeks ago.
Emily Wade, 38, was last seen on Jan. 5 in Ennis.
Ennis Chief of Police John Erisman said that the body was found in Chambers Creek near a low water crossing; he told WFAA that Wade may have been swept into the creek the night she went missing.
Volunteers and rescue workers had spent more than a week searching near Ennis to find the missing woman.
“It was so thick, we couldn’t hardly get into where she was found,” Toney Wade, commander of the Cajun Coasts volunteers, told KTRK.
Wade’s vehicle still has not been located.
The Dallas County Medical Examiner has scheduled an autopsy for the body to confirm the identity and determine the cause of death.
Went Missing After Movie
Wade, a waitress at Chili’s and mother to a 7-year-old, initially went missing after watching a movie with a co-worker.
She arrived at the co-worker’s house around 5:30 p.m. A male friend told police officers that he saw her drive away around 8:30 p.m., officials told WFAA. The co-worker and friend is cooperating with the police.
Family members said that her bank account hadn’t been touched and that her cellphone had not been used after she went missing.
“I’m scared to death, I’ll be honest with you,” Shirley Wade, Emily’s mother, said. “I’m scared to death. I just don’t know what’s wrong.”
Jared Jones, the father of Emily Wade’s daughter, said shortly after she went missing that he was holding off telling his daughter the news. “It’s going to break her heart. We don’t know what to say to her but we’re going to have to say something to her. She’s very intuitive and she knows something is wrong,” he said.
Ten days after Wade went missing, Jones said his daughter learned that her mother was missing.
“She asks me, ‘Daddy are you going to find Mommy?’ I tell her yes, what, when, or how we’re going to do that,” Jones told WFAA. “Every silver car we see, we break our neck to see if it’s something.”
Family members weren’t sure what exactly happened, but Emily’s brother, Chad Wade, told Fox 4 he believed it was a kidnapping. “I think this is a carjacking or abduction,” he said on Jan. 15.
Missing Persons
Over 600,000 people go missing in the United States every year, according to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.
Many of the missing adults and children are found safe but others are never found or are found dead.
As of Jan. 22, there were 15,325 open missing person cases in addition to 12,449 open unidentified person cases.
As of Dec. 31, 2017, the National Crime Information Center had over 88,000 active missing person cases across the country. But hundreds of thousands of cases were resolved that year.
Approximately 651,000 missing person records were entered but about the same number were removed.
“Reasons for these removals include: a law enforcement agency located the subject, the individual returned home, or the record had to be removed by the entering agency due to a determination that the record is invalid,” the center stated.
