The Putnam County sheriff said Thursday his office is now overseeing what he called a “death investigation” after a Spelman College instructor and an Atlanta private school coach went missing on Lake Oconee over the weekend.
The body of Joycelyn Nicole Wilson, a mathematics instructor, was found Sunday after game wardens were notified of an empty boat circling the popular lake Saturday evening. The GBI crime lab is handling her autopsy.
The cause of death has yet to be officially determined, but Sheriff Howard Sills told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that “this is no longer a simple drowning. This is a death investigation.” He declined to elaborate.
Credit: Channel 2 Action News
Credit: Channel 2 Action News
Gary Jones, a track and field coach at the Westminster Schools and the brother of former University of Georgia and NFL star Sean Jones, has not been found after days of searching a vast stretch of open water northwest of the Wallace Dam. The area is about a dozen miles south of I-20.
“Where he is, we don’t know,” said Sills, whose search team was accompanied on the lake Thursday by an AJC reporter and photographer.
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
Investigators have found a pair of shoes that Sills said family members of Jones have identified as belonging to the coach. They were located sometime in the past few days in the water near some rocks in the general vicinity of where Wilson’s body was found, the sheriff said. They were found floating in the water near the shoreline, at a site directly across the lake from where the boat was located.
The Georgia Department of Natural Resources said its search efforts, including the use of sonar equipment, also resumed Thursday. The department has described its operation as a “recovery mission.”
DNR spokesperson Mark McKinnon said their “mission is the same — to locate and recover the male victim of the boating incident." The department is ready to assist the sheriff’s office in the case, he added.
Sills' team crisscrossed the open water 9 miles down the lake from where the couple launched their craft, scanning the surface for any sign of Jones. That part of Lake Oconee, around Riley Shoals and Richland Creek, is popular among pleasure boaters during the warmer months.
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
After retrieving the shoes thought to belong to Jones from a DNR boat, Sills headed back to dry land.
Before departing, he acknowledged that “the complexion of the case has changed somewhat.”
“There are many other factors at work that I can’t really elaborate on at this time,” the sheriff said.
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Sills said crews would continue cruising the lake for any other clues.
“That’s about all we can do at this point in time,” he said. “There are other things going, but this is about all we can talk about today.”
A DNR helicopter buzzed the search site and other reaches of the 19,000-acre reservoir while a dozen or so search boats scoured the 80-plus-foot-deep main river channel.
“I’ve never seen this many resources in any drowning before,” Sills said.
More than a dozen volunteer searchers in boats equipped with aerial and underwater drones, dive gear and high-tech sonar devices joined officials in the search Thursday.
The volunteers, led by the Emergency Dive Response Team, fanned out across the water shortly before noon from the Long Shoals public boat ramp, roughly a mile by water from where Wilson’s body was found Sunday.
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
The group is a nonprofit underwater search team that is dedicated to helping families recover drowning victims, according to its website.
The team’s director, Richard Pickering, said searchers were focusing on an area just up the lake from Oconee’s renowned “jumping rock,” a recreational area where summertime lakegoers leap into the water from a massive granite boulder.
That part of the lake is treacherous for boaters as submerged treetops — that grew there before the dam was built — are just beneath the surface and can present hazards.
“Our goal is to find the victim as quickly as possible to bring some closure to the family … to hopefully put this tragedy behind them,” Pickering said.
The spot where the search is centered is about 10 miles east-northeast of Eatonton, the Putnam County seat, and a little over 3 miles due south of the Ritz-Carlton Reynolds, Lake Oconee resort.
The group spread out across the lake in several boats. The team is equipped to provide “resources, equipment, tactical support along with proven search methods that are instrumental in the recovery of very difficult and sometimes extremely dangerous underwater recoveries,” its website states.
The group does not charge for its services.
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
The small boat that the two were in was found Saturday idling and circling by some people in a pontoon boat, Sills said. That group called 911 after happening upon the empty craft.
Sills said he and his investigators have obtained video of the couple launching the boat some 9 miles away by water, roughly two hours before the pontoon boaters spotted the empty vessel.
The pair can be seen in video footage launching the boat from Fish Tale Marina at a ramp along Ga. 44, just across the Lick Creek branch of the lake and The Lodge on Lake Oconee, where the couple had been staying, Sills said.
The hotel declined to confirm to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution if Jones and Wilson had stayed there.
The sheriff said Jones drove the boat across the water and met Wilson at the hotel, where witnesses were said to have seen them ride away together.
— Please return to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution for updates.
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