Fire investigation continues; funeral services planned
Published 8:46 pm Tuesday, May 17, 2016
- Technicians with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation continue to search for clues Tuesday at the scene of a fire on Rossman Dairy Road. Five bodies were found in the burning residence.
Editor’s note: This article has been corrected from its original version.
MOULTRIE, Ga. — As an investigation into the deaths of five young adults on Sunday continued through a third day on Tuesday, police activity indicated they were working a criminal probe.
Law enforcement released no new details on Tuesday, but detectives and crime scene investigators were again at 505 Rossman Dairy Road, where the gutted wood frame residence sits about 220 feet off the roadway in a pecan orchard. They were there much of the day and also spent much of Monday at the scene.
On Sunday, three calls were placed to 911, the first at about 8:28 a.m., alerting emergency workers to a fire at that location. Five bodies found inside the gutted residence were sent for autopsy the next day.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation and Colquitt County Sheriff’s Office are in charge of the investigation. The number of state fire investigators at the scene has diminished.
On Tuesday the GBI’s mobile crime truck was parked at the location.
In a mid-afternoon email response on Tuesday the GBI said it had nothing new to report at the time.
As the investigation had brought no answers, anxious friends and family members of the four men and one woman, all between the ages of 20 and 22, were active on social media.
In an email response to The Observer, Shelby Bush described her cousin Aaron Reid Williams, 21, as the “guy that always made everybody laugh.
“Him and my sons grew up together. He was the epitome of just a good ol’ Georgia Boy,” she said.
Reid recently had started working at Southern Powder Coating, she said, after being employed at Harvey’s.
“If you were sad or depressed, just go hang out with Reid for a little bit (and) you would be laughing in no time,” Bush said. “You only have to look at his Facebook page to see how much he is loved and missed.”
The others whose bodies were recovered on Sunday from the residence were Jordan Shane Croft, 22; Jonathan Garrett Edwards Jr. and Ramsey Jones Pidcock, both 21; and 20-year-old Alicia Brooke Norman.
Stan Kirksey, Colquitt County Roads and Bridges Department superintendent, remembered Croft from his time as an employee there. He was employed through a temporary agency and drove a motor grader scraping dirt roads in the county.
He worked there from about March through September of 2015.
“Jordan was liked by everybody here,” he said. “He was a really good young man, he came ready to work. He was a really good worker and got a lot of compliments when he was working here.”
Colquitt County Coroner Verlyn Brock said on Tuesday that he had no autopsy reports and said it could be some time before the GBI forensics laboratory completes its work and makes a report available to him.
“It’s still in limbo,” he said. “The investigation is still ongoing.”
Funeral announcements for all five of the victims are in today’s Observer on Page 4A.