A man last seen alive Sunday riding a horse was found dead Monday afternoon by members of the Smithville-DeKalb County Rescue Squad about a half hour after they were summoned to start looking for him.
Dead is Micheal Minnear.
Minnear and others had reportedly been riding horses together but he later decided to go home and separated from the group. When he didn’t show up at home, a search began.
Members of the Smithville-DeKalb County Rescue Squad joined the search just before noon Monday and found Minnear’s body at the bottom of a ravine off Holmes Creek Road shortly after noon.
“We got the official page at 11:43 a.m. Monday and went looking for someone riding a horse who had been missing since Sunday,” said Joe Johnson of the Smithville-DeKalb County Rescue Squad. “We got our equipment together, spread into four groups, and started looking in the area from the Herb Cottage all the way to Cordell Love Road. At about 12:15 p.m. two of our Rescue Squad members spotted what appeared to be a horse at the bottom of a ravine on Holmes Creek Road (the road across from the Golf Course) about half a mile down the road on the right. They walked down in the woods to get a closer look and saw a red horse standing in the creek. They also noticed a body laying near the horse. Rescue Squad members converged on the scene and found it was the person we had been looking for. We did not approach the body until we called the sheriff’s department. Two Sheriff’s Department investigators, who had also been looking for him, came and did their investigation. We then got ropes and a stokes basket, lowered about 350 feet down, recovered the body, and brought it back up,” said Johnson.
Johnson expressed his appreciation to fellow Rescue Squad members for their part in the search including Dustin Johnson, who coordinated the groups in using four wheelers, gators, and trucks in covering the area.
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