(Reuters) -The bodies of seven people, including two missing teens and a convicted sex offender, were found Monday afternoon on a property near the small Oklahoma city of Henryetta, the county sheriff said.
Corpses believed to be 14-year-old Ivy Webster and 16-year-old Brittany Brewer were found when officers searched the property where the sex offender, Jesse McFadden, lived, Okmulgee County Sheriff Eddy Rice said at a news briefing posted online by television station KOTV in Tulsa.
Other bodies likely included McFadden and members of his family, Rice said, cautioning that none of the victims had yet been formally identified by the county medical examiner.
The county issued an amber alert earlier Monday saying the two teens were missing, but the alert was called off after the bodies were found.
“Our hearts go out to the families and friends and schoolmates and everyone else,” Rice said. “It’s just a tragedy.”
Rice said officers arrived at about 3 p.m. (2000 GMT) to search the property and found the bodies.
KOTV reported that Brittany Brewer had gone to spend the weekend with the McFadden family, citing her father, Nathan Brewer. She was supposed to have returned home Sunday night but never arrived.
“Brittany was an outgoing person,” Brewer told the station in a video posted on its website. “She was actually selected to be Miss Henryetta coming up in July for the National Miss Pageant in Tulsa, and now she ain’t gonna make it because she’s dead. She’s gone.”
McFadden, 39, had been scheduled to begin a trial on Monday for using a cellphone while in prison to send sexual messages to a teenage girl, the station reported.
The Oklahoma Sex Offender registry shows a Jesse Lee McFadden, age 39, living at the address where the bodies were found, with a photo that matches the one of McFadden used in local media. It shows that he was convicted of first degree rape in Oklahoma in 2003.
Gerald Davidson, a spokesman for the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, said an individual on Monday told the violent crime task force in the Okmulgee County District Attorney’s office that the two girls might be in the presence of someone at the property on Holly Road just outside of Henryetta.
Sheriff’s deputies went to the scene twice. The first time, they did not make contact with anyone, but on their second visit they discovered evidence that led them to the bodies, Davidson said.
(Reporting by Sharon Bernstein; Editing by Leslie Adler and Sonali Paul)
Comments