PORT TOWNSEND — A three-hour search of a Port Townsend city park Thursday night for leads in the case of a Sequim woman now missing for just more than two weeks has turned up nothing.
“Nothing found was related to the case at all,” Officer Patrick Fudally, Port Townsend police spokesman, said this morning.
From about 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday, volunteers with Jefferson County Search and Rescue, county sheriff’s deputies and a Port Townsend police detective scoured the trails and bushes of the city’s Kah Tai Lagoon Nature Park, near where Lauryn R. Garrett was last seen.
The banks of the lagoon in the center of the 80-acre park were also checked by searchers in kayaks, Fudally said.
“[The search] turned up nothing of use,” he said.
Garett’s father, Fred Garrett of Sequim, said he had expected her back home by bus from Port Townsend after the two spoke May 1.
She had come from a rehabilitation clinic in Sedro-Woolley, a day earlier than she was scheduled to return.
A witness saw Garrett at about 7:47 p.m. May 1 at the Haines Place Park and Ride in Port Townsend, next to the nature park and near the Safeway supermarket on Sims Way.
She was seen just after that on Safeway surveillance video buying a bottle of vodka and a bottle of soda, Port Townsend police said.
She has not been seen or heard from since.
Fudally said investigators on the case continue to follow up on leads as they come in.
“We’re hoping some lead that comes in pans out, but right now we’re still not really any closer,” Fudally said.
A task force comprising Port Townsend police detectives, members of the Clallam and Jefferson sheriff’s offices and an FBI agent from the Poulsbo office was formed earlier this week to organize the investigation into Garrett’s disappearance.
The 23-year-old had borrowed a cellphone from a man at the Haines Place park and ride to call her father May 1, according to police.
This man, police said, later told investigators he saw Garrett walk toward the nearby Safeway after she left two duffel bags in a tree-lined area near the park and ride.
The missing woman’s mother, Eleana Livingston-Christianson of Sequim, found one of the two duffel bags in bushes near the park and ride May 7.
The other bag has not been found, police said.
Police found Garrett’s personal items and a receipt for the Safeway purchase in the recovered bag.
Garrett is 5 feet, 7 inches tall and weighs between 120 and 130 pounds. She has brown hair and hazel eyes.
She has a tattoo of a bird behind her left ear and a tattoo of Washington state on her right wrist.
Anyone with information about Garrett’s whereabouts should phone police at 360-385-3831, ext. 1, or, if it’s an emergency matter, 9-1-1.
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Reporter Jeremy Schwartz can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5074, or at jschwartz@peninsuladailynews.com.
