Search teams work through 300 acres in search for Texas State student
LULING, Texas - Search teams worked through 300 acres northeast of Luling Tuesday, much of it was filled with brush and mesquite trees. Despite the effort, shortly after noon, a field team leader declared the site was clean, and search coordinator Gene Robinson called everyone in.
"So I feel pretty confident, that again, we know where he is not ... No, we cant be 100% but we can say 60%, 70% possibility he is not here, " said Robinson.
Jason Landry has been missing since Sunday, December 13, when he left San Marcos to spend Christmas break in Houston with family. This gravel road northeast of Luling is where his wrecked car was found the following Monday.
It was spotted, reportedly, by a local first responder who was returning from an unrelated call. Last week, after Landry’s body was not found in a pond that was drained, state troopers turned the case over to Caldwell County authorities.
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Gene Robinson was bought in to help take a second look at the scene. He used video feeds from drones and special imagining technology to search for Landry.
"The locate software that we use, will detect colors and look for things that don't exist in nature, that sort of thing, and its very effective. We did have some targets that we identified as something that should be checked on, and we did send a team out there, and they ended up being man-made items but they were not related to the case," said Robinson.
As the area was searched, Caldwell County detectives traveled to Houston Tuesday and met with Landry’s family. I’m told they collected items taken out of his wrecked car in order to process them as evidence.
Landry’s father Kent spoke to FOX 7 Austin by phone and said he considers these latest developments as positive news. That conversation reinforced the hope he expressed before leaving Luling on Friday. "If someone knows something, you might know something, might have seen him, someone, or something, please tell someone," said Kent Landry on Friday.
Robinson also refuses to rule out the possibility that Jason Landry is still alive.
"We never say never, because we have had cases where after 7 days, or 10 days, and we thought we were on a recovery, 9 days later they were found, well and walking around, in some very severe environments. And there are more than one of those so I've gotten to the point, of saying, never say never in cases like this because he could well be out there somewhere that we just don’t know where he is," said Robinson.