Case grows cold in the search for Albany toddler missing since Jan. 22 tornado

ALBANY — It has been nearly a year since toddler Detrez Green was reported missing from Piney Wood Estates trailer park on Sylvester Highway five hours after an EF3 tornado ripped through Dougherty County on Jan. 22, causing catastrophic damage and killing five people.

During the week following the cyclone, hundreds of search and rescue personnel scoured the area around Piney Wood Estates in search of the 2-year-old boy who is listed as missing. The search perimeter included an area a half-mile in diameter, with personnel going as far as a mile and a half downstream of a small nearby creek. Emergency crews drained a pond, brought in cadaver dogs and flew searchers at tree-top level with a helicopter, but the child was not found.

On Jan. 27, the search was called off, with officials declaring that Detrez was not in the area.

“We brought in the Georgia Search and Rescue Team to search every possible place we could and exhaust all those resources and make a determination of where the missing person may be,” Dougherty County Emergency Management Agency Director Ron Rowe, who is retiring from that position and as Albany fire chief on New Year’s Eve, said. “We had over 200 people in the area.

“We cleared an area to ground level and below at least 150 yards away from the site. We drained a pond to where you could walk through it. We put dive teams in other sections of it. We went a mile and a half downstream. We went hundreds of yards past the pond area. We literally cleared the ground to dirt. It is in our best, expert judgment that in this area, the missing person was not there.”

As the anniversary of his disappearance, there is still no sign of Detrez.

Investigators involved with the case say they are both frustrated and baffled by the many unanswered questions surrounding Detrez’s mysterious disappearance, such as why the family waited five hours to report the boy missing when emergency personnel were on the scene within an hour, why the parents seemed so calm, why there are no pictures of the boy, and why have the parents cut off communication with law enforcement.

Capt. Tom Jackson of the Dougherty County Police Department, one of the investigators in charge of the case, said he has sleepless nights wondering what happened to Detrez.

“This is a very frustrating missing person case,” Jackson said. “I can’t help but lie awake at night and wonder what happened to that boy.”

The afternoon of Jan. 22 was a tense day for Albany. The community, still reeling from the Jan. 2 storm which knocked out power and damaged thousands of homes, watched with nervous anticipation as another powerful storm system approached from the southwest and ultimately spawned an EF3 strength tornado.

That tornado, which stayed on the ground for 71 miles after touching down north of Newton in Baker County, carved a path of destruction from the southwest to northeast corners of Dougherty County and beyond. The worst damage in Dougherty was concentrated in two areas, Paradise Village trailer park on Holly Drive, the area in which five people lost their lives that afternoon, and Piney Wood Estates trailer park off Sylvester Highway.

Many of the homes in these areas were reduced to rubble. Kevian Green and Adijah Rainey, the parents of the missing boy, were living at Piney Wood Estates when the storm struck. Their mobile home suffered the same fate.

According to Albany 911 Communications Manager Sheila Sims, the first missing person call for Green came in around 8 p.m. on Jan. 22., almost five hours after the tornado struck.

During the call from Rainey, the mother reported that her son was missing.

“I was trying to call 911 to report my son missing,” Rainey said in the 911 call. “I don’t know where he is. The wind must of toted him off or something.”

When asked by the 911 operator if she had searched the trailer park for her son Rainey replied, “Yeah, I did. I didn’t walk all over, I just tried to hurry up and seek shelter. They told us to come to the front and I checked everywhere in our area and I couldn’t see him.”

According to Sims, the call from Rainey was one of the most unusual missing person calls that she has taken in the 18 years that she has worked for the emergency 911 service.

“I have been here for about 18 years,” Sims said, describing how calmly Rainey sounded when she called 911. “In my experience, with a child that age, the parents are usually hysterical and screaming that we are not doing enough and we just didn’t get that. I believe the first call came in shortly after 8 p.m., it may have been 8:01 or 8:02 p.m. She (Rainey) was not at the address that it happened. She said she had to get to a phone to call us and that was hours later.”

When investigators made contact with Rainey, she told them that her son was with her when the tornado struck and that she lost sight of him when a large tree crashed through their trailer. According to Rainey, the child was last seen near the kitchen.

Rainey’s home, like the rest of Piney Wood Estates, was a disaster area after the storm. Trailers had been torn to shreds. Broken bits of everything including insulation, toys, roofs, trash, sinks, cloths, and trees littered the area among smashed overturned cars.

Investigators faced a daunting task of locating the boy amid a mountain of debris with few details to go on.

The narrative from the original missing person report filed by Rainey with the Dougherty County Police Department described the incident in one sentence.

“On Sunday, January 22, 2017 at 2058 hours, Adijah Rainey reported that her son, Detrez Green, was missing from 3527 Sylvester Road, Lot 8, Albany, Ga.,” the official report said.

The job of locating the boy was further complicated by the fact that there were no pictures of Detrez.

In most missing person cases, according to Jackson, a photo of the person missing would be distributed, but in this case, no such photo existed.

“There are no photos, that I know of, of Detrez Green,” Jackson said. “To me that is a little strange that two parents would not have a photo of their child, not to mention that it makes it extremely difficult to locate a missing person when you don’t know what he looks like.”

When Detrez was not found in the original search, the Dougherty County Police Department, on Jan. 27, requested the assistance of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. After the bureau got involved, the case took a bizarre turn and investigators, although they would not explain why, performed an exhaustive search of the former residence of Kevian Green and Adijah Rainey in Ashburn.

“On Friday, the Dougherty County Police Department requested the GBI assist in the search (of the missing boy),” GBI Office of Public Affairs Director Nelly Miles told the Herald on Feb. 2. “That is when we came on board. Since that point, two days ago, we ended up in Ashburn at the previous home of the parents of Detrez Green. The case is active, and we are continuing the search.”

Miles never addressed specifically the reasons the GBI searched the Ashburn home, located at 1006 Pineknot Road, when the toddler had been reported missing in Albany.

“There is nothing that I can release at this time,” Miles said at the time. “All I can say is that we are following the evidence from the case. It is a missing persons case, and we did receive questions about us being in that location (1006 Pineknot Road Ashburn), so we were able to confirm that, yes, we are in that location and it is related to the missing-persons case.”

Since February, the GBI has provided no updates about the case.

Many in the Albany community even have speculated that Detrez may not have existed, but authorities, along with a 2014 police report of an incident involving the couple when they lived in Ashburn, have confirmed his existence.

On Nov. 2, 2014, officers responded to 1006 Pineknot Road, the home of Kevian Green and Adijah Rainey, in Ashburn.

“Witnesses heard the victim screaming and all the doors were locked,” the Ashburn Police report on the incident said. After officers spoke with the sister of Rainey, who informed them that Green was violent and there was a gun in the house, the SWAT team was called in, the report said.

“We stood by until SWAT had cleared the house,” the report said. “Adijah and her six day old baby were brought out to a patrol vehicle. Once the scene was clear the one year old was brought out to the patrol car as well.”

Authorities confirmed that the 6-day-old child was Detrez.

Green was arrested after the incident, but no charges are listed in the report, which simply reads, “cleared by arrest.”

As the anniversary of Detrez’s disappearance approaches, investigators reluctantly admit that the case has grown cold, and the boy may never be found.

“We are at a standstill right now unless we receive some more information,” Jackson said last week. “The family, is not talking. They are not saying anything to us. Pretty much they’ve have decided that they have pretty much nothing else to say about it.

“We have no other physical evidence to go on at this point, so we are stuck with what we got. Unfortunately, it’s considered a cold case at this point, not to mean that it’s not an open case, it’s just cold, until we get some new facts that can lead us in a new direction.”