Remember this quote by DVD? "but regardless of that, we have still have two wonderful boys to bring up"
(Easy come? Easy Go?) Strange comment.....
SABRE SPRINGS ---- As the number of search volunteers waned with the start of the workweek, the father of the missing 7-year-old Sabre Springs girl, her uncle and grandfather joined the volunteers searching for the girl in an area near their home Tuesday.
While they searched, San Diego police took a bloodhound through the van Dams' home into the neighborhood looking for clues. San Diego police Capt. Ron Newman later told reporters they had no new information in the case.
Though Danielle's uncle had joined searchers once before, her father and grandfather were going out for the first time Tuesday morning.
Before Tuesday's search efforts began, Danielle's father, Damon van Dam, said he had wanted to participate in the efforts to find Danielle since she vanished from her home Feb. 2, but had been advised by a media liaison not to. He said he was told that he could be more effective doing interviews with media to keep publicizing his daughter's story in hopes that someone who knows what happened to her will come forward.
"(But) I need to be more involved. I'm a hands-on guy. That's why I want to be involved, so I'm not crying all day," he said.
Van Dam and his wife's brother Tom Cope and his wife's father, Tom Cope Sr., arrived at the Laura Recovery Center Foundation on Tuesday just before 10 a.m. and joined three volunteers searching a 25- to 35-mile radius around the family's Mountain Pass home.
The center has had drastically fewer volunteers since Monday because people have returned to their regular jobs, center founder Bob Smither said. The biggest need the center has now is trying to find volunteers to help search.
The family members and three men drove together to an area east of Interstate 15 off Sabre Springs Parkway. They hiked down around a dirt trail around an abandoned fenced-in water pump station.
"I just want to find my daughter," van Dam said.
The men fanned out from the path and trudged through 7-foot-high dried reeds along Los Penasquitos Canyon Creek and dipped walking sticks into the creeks and ponds.
Van Dam got on his stomach to try to look under a small concrete bridge. He climbed up and peered down into a large water tank, and dislodged a manhole cover to check inside. Other searchers looked in pipes and in high brush areas.
Volunteers also looked for areas where the ground was disturbed ---- signs that someone might have gone off the path.
Meanwhile, back at the van Dam family home, investigators took a bloodhound into Danielle's room to pick up her scent. They put a shirt belonging to Danielle on a stick and led the dog to the house next door, but not across the street to where a neighbor, who has been questioned in the case, lives.
Van Dam said he hoped the media would continue to focus on finding Danielle through the weekend.
He said he and his wife, Brenda, have had a hard time sleeping.
"Explaining it to the boys is hard, especially the oldest (son)," Damon van Dam said. "We hope she comes back ... but regardless of that, we have still have two wonderful boys to bring up."
Smither said while most of the members of the Texas-based Laura Recovery Center Foundation people would be leaving today, one person would remain to help guide the local volunteers through Sunday. The center also will remain through Sunday at the Doubletree Golf Resort at 14455 Penasquitos Drive in Carmel Mountain Ranch. The center can be reached at (858) 485-4185.
During the weekend, the goal is to have 600 volunteers, so 30 search parties can be sent out each day, volunteer Bruce Humphrey said. Van Dam said they also will send out some representatives into the desert areas this weekend with fliers and maps asking people if they will take some extra time to search for Danielle.
Van Dam said he plans to be more involved in the search operations and has gotten an overview of the operations, but his first priority is to find his daughter.
Center volunteers said they expect to announce this week that they will open a new operations center in Sabre Springs at Poway and Pomerado roads and select a new manager for the operations for next week.
On Monday, the family offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to the capture and conviction of anyone responsible for Danielle's abduction. A San Diego bail bondsman, George "King" Stahlman, also offered a $50,000 reward on top of the van Dams' reward.
Today, Pat and Oscar's restaurant at 12045 Carmel Mountain Road will be holding a fund-raiser from 5 to 9 p.m., and 15 percent of proceeds will go toward the search effort for Danielle. To participate, people need to bring in one of the fliers that can be downloaded from www.daniellemissing.com.
Pink and purple ribbons will be sold for $1 at the Poway Wal-Mart, 13425 Community Road, through the end of the week. All proceeds will go toward a fund for Danielle, Wal-Mart spokeswoman April Papalio said.
A van Dam family friend, Bill Libby, who has managed the family's Danielle fund, said they have $1,600 in the fund as of Monday afternoon. That money will eventually be used for search and recovery efforts, but none has been spent yet, Libby said.
staff writer Yvette Urrea
2/13/02
Handing out refreshments and wearing pink and purple ribbons isn't a real picture of a frantic family in search of their daughter.
Of course, in Damon's self-defense, he DID ask a neighbor if he'd seen Danielle that morning, because she was known to "sleep-walk"...(sarcasm mode off)
sw
How did Damon KNOW that "something awful happened in that (Danielle's) ROOM?" [as opposed to somewhere else in usual abduction/molestation scenario]... How, in effect, did they already know for sure as revealed by their speech patterns, that Danielle was dead and not coming back, long before the sun had set on Feb. 2?
IMHO One or both of these parents had seen her dead, or received certain information to that effect from someone they j w knew to be right--before they ever reported her missing.
See percentages posted earlier on this and other threads.
It has been widely alleged including by DW, that the vehicle of Damon van Dam was not at the VD home when he left for the bar nor had it returned when he returned from the bar.
IF THIS CAN BE TRUE, as checked by neighbors etc, then obviously the children were left alone in an unsecured house, and very probably all night---
and furthermore, the VD's entire story as told under oath would be FALSE, and one of the earlier rumors that he was away with another woman all night, would probably prove true.
One wonders whether his admission to "Barbara in bed" et al was not just to deflect suspicion away as to whether HE was even in the bed, much less Barbara.
p
There is also now this latest question about the Westerfield SUV as distinguished from the RV. Perhaps DW was up loading the SUV vehicle late that evening, till 2 or 3, but that testimony has been called into question, and he may have simply gone to bed when he returned home at midnight. But THIS IS NOT THE VEHICLE that contained any prints, dna, or other evidence of Danielle/Brenda van Dam.
However early or late he last was in the vehicle on 2/1, did he let it sit there until he left in it some 9-or-10 for Hi-Valley to recover his RV-motorhome?
If so, that would virtually eliminate any chance that whatever was in the RV had any bearing on the fate of Danielle or vice-versa, since said RV was away in storage during the whole operative time. We also know where he went in it that weekend once he had it, which is very much anti-Dehesa if you see what I mean.
For any conventional guilt theory involving Westerfield to hold up at all well, we need for him to have somehow gotten up very early Sat. am, driven out to Hi-Valley, put something awful into the RV, without leaving any traces whatever of the unspeakable's presence in the SUV in which it had been taken out there...
And then he drove the awful thing out in the RV and dumped it at Dehesa, then returned to Hi-Valley, left the RV there again for the moment, returned to Sabre Springs in the SUV, stayed an hour at most, then returned yet again to Hi-Valley to pick up the RV and then return yet again to Sabre Springs by 9 am or so...
all of this unevidenced by the neighbors as far as I can see, who were up and around and thick as fleas on a dog. They say, if I understand anything, that he calmly slept in until he and the SUV left at 9:30 or 10?