When he was last seen more than two months ago, Bobby Shore had escaped the rapidly sinking SUV that crashed Dec. 13 into Alabama's Weiss Lake with seven people inside.
The two women who survived the icy plunge "still place him there and say he was swimming downstream," said Cherokee County, Ala., coroner Dr. Jeremy Deaton.
Weiss Lake"The search still continues," Deaton said Tuesday. "We were down there all day Saturday looking again."
Shore is presumed dead, but Weiss Lake has not given up his body. Deaton said searchers believe Shore's body is somewhere between the boat ramp at Lee's Landing and the Alabama Power Co. dam. An almost straight line drawn between those two points is about 2.75 miles long.
"We have no evidence to prove he's alive and still have no body," Deaton said. He said investigators checked Shore's bank cards and cellphone records for activity but found nothing.
"We've had cadaver dogs again and we had underwater cameras put down where the cadaver dogs hit," he said.
Despite cadaver dog hits, the underwater cameras didn't find Shore's body, Deaton said.
"The family's getting frustrated because the rescue squad can't find him, and we're getting frustrated because we can't find him, and we're questioning whether he was even in the car," Deaton said.
But a second round of interviews with surviving passengers Kim Learned and Brittany Nicole Leslie, who also has been listed with the last name Hobson, produced no new information. The two women told authorities Shore was in the front passenger seat and that he made it out of the SUV when they did. But the women lost sight of Shore as they fought for survival themselves.
The four who died in the crash and were recovered were identified as Robert Hardin; Cheryl Hobson; her daughter, Christy Hobson; and Dale Keener, officials said.
Officials said the area of the search remains confined to the channel between the eastern and western parts of the Weiss Lake reservoir and points downstream toward the Alabama Power Co. power plant that links that end of the lake back to the Coosa River. Shore disappeared in water estimated to be 18 feet deep where the SUV went down.
Deaton said the bottom of Weiss Lake is littered with old home foundations and other structures inundated when the river was dammed in 1961. Those old structures might have caught Shore's body, Deaton said. Most of the lake ranges from 20-40 feet deep.
Deaton said the search will continue periodically.
Contact staff writer Ben Benton at bbenton@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6569.