Teen’s car found in Addison

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ADDISON – The search for a missing teenager from Columbia took an ominous turn late Thursday afternoon when her submerged car was pulled from the Pleasant River, but Krystal Higgins was not found in the vehicle.

Maine State Police divers searched in 16 feet of water off the Addison Public Boat Landing as high tide came in, until darkness fell. They will resume the search for the 17-year-old this morning. Higgins has been missing since Saturday night.

The car was discovered upside down on the river bottom around 3 p.m. by Maine Marine Patrol officers who were using sonar to search water near several boat landings along the Washington County coastline.

Lt. Dennis Appleton of the state’s Criminal Investigation Division refused to speculate on the fate of the young woman.

“I have no idea if foul play is involved,” he said.

Asked if it were likely that divers might find Higgins’ body in the water, Appleton answered: “That’s the probability.”

The asphalt boat landing, located approximately five miles from where Higgins last was seen near the Harrington Irving station, is reached by a deliberate turn off the main road through Addison. It is marked by signs and extends approximately 75 yards into the Pleasant River before gradually sloping approximately 100 feet to the water. It has no guardrails.

The car, located approximately 20 yards from the end of the landing, had apparently gone undetected all week by local lobstermen, who work their boats and traps in the vicinity.

“I was there at 6:30 a.m. Monday morning,” said Danny Stubbs, one of four Addison men who regularly fish the river. “I was putting 50 traps on my boat in almost low water, and nothing showed up on the bottom machine.

“The other guys had even gone out before I got there.”

The area has 10-foot tides, Stubbs said, making the depth of the water about 6 feet at low tide.

The area around the boat landing had been searched as a shoreline, but was “not an area of high concentration,” Appleton said.

“We covered the area in a ground search today,” he said.

Higgins’ vehicle, a 1997 Chevrolet Cavalier, was pulled from the muddy, murky water around 5 p.m. The headlights, windshield wipers and ignition were all on, divers discovered.

A large crowd gathered to watch the car come from the water. One of the observers who was briefed by police investigators said that Higgins’ cellular phone was one of the items found in the car.

Higgins had made as many as seven calls to two friends after 1 a.m. Sunday. The origins of the calls were traced to within a 15-mile radius of the Milbridge tower, and the Maine Warden Service had concentrated its search on the ground.

The woman’s disappearance at midnight Saturday had left friends and family baffled for reasons she was gone so suddenly. She was reported missing on Sunday evening by the best friend with whom she had been living since April.

The discovery of the car was a crushing end to an already emotional afternoon. The community of Columbia, where Higgins lived with two different families since last fall, had turned out with casseroles and cookies to support the searchers.

Scores of professional and civilian searchers had combed Down East roads and woods since morning, the second day of an expansive search.

The Columbia Fire Station had been transformed Thursday into not just a command post but a gathering place for many who know Higgins and many more who were touched by her plight.

“There is not going to be enough thanks for the people here,” Stewart Stanwood, one of the town’s volunteer firefighters involved with the search, said Thursday afternoon before the news filtered in. “The input has been overwhelming.”

More than 200 volunteers, many of them trained in search and rescue, had taken assignments to cover the brush along roads and side roads. They came from around the state, all driving in at their own expense and on their own time.

Dozens more law enforcement officers joined the search through the day. Numbers escalated to include 16 game wardens, 12 Maine State Police, 12 from the U.S. Coast Guard, nine Maine Forest Service rangers with two helicopters, four deputies with the Washington County Sheriff’s Department and three Maine Marine Patrol officers with a boat.

“We’re grasping at straws,” Sheriff Joseph Tibbetts had said in midafternoon. “We have nothing else to go on.”

Then came the call to the mobile police unit that a car had been located off the Addison boat landing. John Cote, a supervising detective out of Houlton, is also a diver. He was able to confirm underwater that the car belongs to Higgins.

Two more detectives, Miles Carpenter and Jeffrey Ingemi, went door to door interviewing residents who live within sight of the boat landing.

The crowd lingered as police divers entered the water in search of Higgins.

One of those watching, Marla Alley, lives within a half-mile of the landing. Higgins had lived with the Alleys between January and November 2003, at a time when her home life had been in turmoil.

Alley and her teenage daughter had offered Higgins, who became legally emancipated from her father and stepmother during that time, a safe place.

When the car came out of the water Thursday, Alley had a single thought for the young woman, she said: “If you had come just a little bit further, you would have been home.”

The Associated Press contributed to this story.