An investigative group is looking for volunteers to help bring closure to a couple of local families.
Please Bring Me Home has put a call out for people interested in helping with ongoing grid searches for Luciano Trinaistich, who went missing in July 2007, and Chris Rivers, who's been missing since August 2017.
There is a full weekend of searches on May 11-12, after that executive director Nick Oldrieve said they want to have searches every second Sunday.
Both of the cases have connections to the west end of Murphy Road. Over eight kilometres long, the road connects Highway 655 to Florence Street (Hallnor Road) north of the Ontario government complex, on the way to the Bell Creek Mine site.
Please Bring Me Home was in town last spring for a search.
In Northern Ontario, the non-profit group has been involved in investigating the cases of Luke Joly in North Bay and Meagan Pilon in Sudbury.
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They plan to be slow and methodical when they return to the Timmins area. Oldrieve said people will walk, stop, rake, and repeat.
"It's literally that painstakingly slow. But that's what we do. We don't want to return back. We want it to be certain that there's no one there," he said.
Trinaistich was 79 years old when he went missing. He was last seen on July 24, 2007, according to Timmins Police information on missing people cases.
He was last seen leaving his residence to go blueberry picking in the Highway 655 area and his vehicle was located on July 25, 2007, on Murphy Road.
Rivers was 44 when he was last seen in Timmins on Aug. 29, 2017. His vehicle was found abandoned in a wooded area of Murphy Road on Sept. 6, 2017.
A police ground search of the area turned up no signs of him and the search was suspended. Police later expanded the focus area for another ground search at the end of September 2017.
Both of the families reached out to Please Bring Me Home and know that the searches are happening, said Oldrieve. The local police are also notified about searches.
For the weekend of May 11 and 12, the group will be going out from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. You can also participate in half days.
A couple of people from Please Bring Me Home will lead the weekend-long event, with the hope being to appoint a local leader to take over the ongoing searches.
"We understand that people may not be able to make every other Sunday work, because of pre-arranged vacations, appointments, illnesses. So we're just asking for a level of consistency of the people that are going to join that they can really try to go out every other Sunday in an organized fashion," he said.
If you're interested in participating, email your full name and phone number to [email protected]om.
