‘Boots on the ground.’ How ‘old-school’ police work led officers to Anitra Gunn’s body.
A blanket of mid-February fog hugged the country road out around Greer’s Garage in the fields, pastures and planted pines that envelope this southerly patch of Crawford County.
As Tuesday evening settled in and a pair of peafowl ambled across Greer Road, some of the garage mechanics stood looking at the cops down the way where, an hour or two earlier and 100-plus yards into the treeline, a young woman’s dead body had been found near the border with Peach County.
The mechanics had known something was amiss shortly after 3 in the afternoon when some patrol cars from the Peach County sheriff’s office began to gather along the country lane a couple of miles east of U.S. 341.
It was perhaps by chance — and a stroke of “potluck,” as the county sheriff would put it — along with a heaping dash of dogged police work that the officers were there at all.
Their search for 23-year-old Fort Valley State University senior Anitra Lashay Gunn, reported missing Saturday, was into its fourth day, and finding her had become their top priority.
“You know,” Peach County Sheriff Terry Deese told a Telegraph reporter, “we all have daughters.”
A Peach sheriff’s investigator named Brian Stewart had, days earlier, picked up a county tour bus that was being worked on at Greer’s Garage.
Now as mid-afternoon set in on Tuesday he was back, canvassing the area, peering at the roadsides, searching.
Sheriff Deese said Stewart and a team of other law enforcement officers had spent endless hours in their quest to find Gunn by trawling the country roads around where she was last known to be alive.
That place was at a house on Chestnut Hill Road, a mile and a half to the east of where her body turned up.
The investigators had since found Gunn’s white 2013 Chevy Cruze parked near her Fort Valley apartment with damage to its front end.
Its front bumper was missing and there was grass and brush jammed in its grille, a sign that it had apparently been driven off-road.
The detectives figured wherever the car had been might be a good place to start looking for Gunn. So they fanned out, scanning the ditches and tree lines.
Deese, the sheriff, said the grass and broom sage embedded in the grille of Gunn’s car provided searchers with a solid clue.
“We knew it had to be an area like that,” he said of the vegetation that might lead searchers to Gunn. “We started at the house (on Chestnut Hill) and were working our way out.”
The immediate search area was a few miles north of Fort Valley, the Peach County seat, and roughly four and a half miles from Fort Valley State University, where Gunn was a senior majoring in agriculture.
Sometime after 3 p.m. on Tuesday, investigator Stewart saw a patch of grass and bushes along Greer Road that looked promising.
Deese said Stewart wheeled in and began following a makeshift path through the pines as far as he could drive.
Maybe 100 yards in, Stewart saw pieces of a car, part of a bumper.
Then in the woods nearby, beneath some tree branches, Stewart found Gunn’s body.
“You talk about all the modern technology and all the gadgets that are out there that we can use as resources,” Deese said. “And then a case like this, just old-school police work solved our problem. And that’s just putting boots on the ground and getting out there.”
This story was originally published February 19, 2020 at 1:00 PM.