Searchers urging people nationwide to look for missing girl

SALT LAKE CITY -- Searchers on Sunday urged people nationwide to check ponds, ditches and woods for any trace of a 14-year-old girl apparently kidnapped at gunpoint from her bedroom.

The number of volunteers searching on foot for Elizabeth Smart had dwindled to several hundred, down from more than 1,000 on Thursday, the day after Elizabeth disappeared.

Some aircraft assisting in the search were diverted to Colorado wildfires.

Bob Walcutt of the Texas-based Laura Recovery Center Foundation, which is coordinating volunteer search efforts, appealed Sunday for the help of property owners around the country.

"Check your land, your ditches, your culverts," he said. "Look around your property and check any hiding places, your ponds, your barns."

Police said they have had no solid leads since Elizabeth was apparently kidnapped at gunpoint from the bedroom of her affluent Salt Lake City home early Wednesday.

Appeals for release

Cynthia Smart-Owens, Elizabeth's aunt, said relatives think she's alive and issued another appeal for her release.

"The solution is to hold your feelings aside and send Elizabeth back to where she feels most at home," Smart-Owens said at a morning news conference. "Let her walk alone where someone can recognize her. ... Please let her go."

Eleven volunteer pilots took their planes up Sunday, down from 25 the day before; the number of weekend campers in nearby mountains made it difficult to locate anything considered suspicious.

Elizabeth, described by friends and family as quiet, was taken from her home between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m. Wednesday. She was wearing red pajamas; police said the kidnapper allowed her to put on white tennis shoes before she was taken.

Police said an intruder forced open a window at the Smart's home and woke the teen-ager and her 9-year-old sister.

The frightened younger girl waited two hours before alerting her parents, complying with the gunman's threat to keep quiet or he would harm her sister, police said.

The younger girl has not been able to clearly describe the man, telling police only that he carried a small black gun and was about 5-foot-8, white, with dark hair, and dressed in a tan denim-type jacket and white baseball cap.

A man sought Saturday through use of a police sketch was questioned and released.

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On the Net:

http://www.elizabethsmart.com

http://www.utahchiefs.org/rachel--alert.htm