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HOUSTON - FOX 26 has stayed true to our promise to highlight and tell the stories of those who have vanished from the greater Houston area.
In this edition of "The Missing," FOX 26 is shedding light on a new group dedicated to finding people who are missing in Texas.
Texas Search and Rescue, also known as TEXSAR now, has a unit dedicated solely to tracking down missing people. The new missing person unit launched in March 2023.
"Just actually looking at the numbers, for instance, last year, 2022 alone, there were just under 48,000 entries of missing persons," said Todd Snyder, Director of TEXSAR.
There are 254 counties in the state of Texas, and this new unit will cover every single one. But Todd and other volunteers wouldn't be able to get the job done without folks like Joseph Huston.
Joseph is a K-9 lead for TEXSAR. He has two K-9s of his own that are trained and skilled at sniffing out human remains. We got up close and personal with one of them, Orion, a 10-year-old black lab.
"The lady was four feet underground and had been there 11 years, and he tracked her down," said Joseph.
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For demonstration purposes, Joseph went into the woods and planted items that had been in contact with human remains, and we got to watch as Orion sniffed those items out.
"A trained final response is what you're seeing, you see he had a change of behavior when he turned his head quickly. As a handler, that's what we're looking for, it took him a while. But once he was confident, he sat right next to it," Joseph explained.
TEXSAR will not self-deploy, and instead they wait on law enforcement, EMS or fire to request their assistance. They have more than 200 volunteers standing by and ready to jump into action when called.
"If it's a live find that we believe has happened within the hour, then we can mobilize within the hour. But if we know it's a cold case from the 1980s, a person is deceased, and we have a reference point of where we're going to go search, then it may be something we schedule out," Snyder explained.
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Aside from K-9's, they have a plethora of other tools and resources to help them on their searches.
"We have aerial assets in the form of drones, helicopters, search teams, a dive team," Snyder said.
TEXSAR says even though they don't mobilize on a family's request, they still want people to reach out to them, and they'll be able to put you in touch with a law enforcement agency that can then request their help for the search efforts.
If you'd like more information about TEXSAR, click here: https://www.texsar.org