Direct Quotes from LE ONLY

Lindsey J. Baum was last seen at 9:15 p.m. Friday when she left her friend's home on Maple Street, where she had been visiting, said Dave Pimentel of the Grays Harbor County Sheriff's Office.
Lindsey was going to walk the four blocks to her home on Mommsen Road, which is roughly a 10-minute walk. But something happened in that short distance - Lindsey never arrived home.

"She hasn't been seen or heard from since," Pimentel said.

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Pimentel said Lindsey has never been a runaway. "We don't suspect that at this time," he said.

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"We don't know what happened to her yet. All we know is she's missing, and we're taking every effort we can to try and locate her," he added.
Police say it appears Lindsey walked at least part of the way with home with friends, who didn't see anything unusual.

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Lindsey Baum, who was wearing a hooded sweatshirt that was either gray or blue, jeans and black sneakers, was walking from her friend’s house on Maple Street to her own home on Mommsen Road, a four-block distance, and was last seen at about 9:15 p.m., said Sgt. Ed Patrick with the Grays Harbor Sheriffs Office.

Baum’s mother called the McCleary Police Department at 10:50 p.m., having waited in case her daughter had run into friends or otherwise dawdled, Patrick said.

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"The worst case scenario-she's the victim of foul play or some type of predator behavior," said Grays Harbor Undersheriff Rick Scott

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Pimentel said it's strange that nobody saw anything unusual.
"Such a small community like this - you can't do much in a town this size without everybody knowing about it," he said. "Everybody in town knows she's unaccounted for."

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Chief George Crumb of the McCleary Police Department said friends and family are assisting the search, and that while his department hopes Baum just ran off on her own, “she’s been gone far too long.”

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In the five years Crumb has been with McCleary there has not been an abduction. No Amber Alert was initiated because no one had seen anyone take her. Lindsey Baum was simply reported as a missing child.
“It did not meet any of the criteria for an Amber Alert,” Crumb said.
McCleary Police set up the initial search, but called in the Sheriffs Office at 4 a.m., Patrick said. Thurston County sheriffs deputies are also assisting.
“We are keeping our fingers crossed,” Crumb said.

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"It's really important that individual realizes that they may be the one person who saw something, that to them was totally worthless, but to us is very important," said Scott.(Undersheriff)

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Police have ruled out all family members as suspects.

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Lindsey’s older brother had left the Maple Street residence before his sister after the two had a dispute over the bike Lindsey had borrowed from him that day – a common occurrence between frequently squabbling siblings, Scott added.

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They spent hours talking to businesses that were open, couriers who might have been in town, and stopping cars passing by, but didn’t come up with much new.

“No one who was here last Friday remembered anything,” said Undersheriff Rick Scott. “We received a few suggestions about where to look or who we might talk to who might have been in the area, but we haven’t received any suggestions so original that they haven’t already been (looked at) in some way or form. The community has been helpful with its support, but even they are running out of ideas.”

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Police are now checking entries in her MySpace page and doing a forensic analysis of her computer looking for new clues. They found an entry from Lindsey a month ago saying, "I've been getting a lot of nightmares lately and I have this bad feeling that something bads gonna happen.”“That's why we're having the computer looked at now forensically to see if there's any other information that may have been deleted or in some other file we didn't access," said Rick Scott of Grays Harbor County Sheriff's Office.

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Scott said that from the beginning, investigators have explored the possibility of family members or friends being involved. Baum’s mother and the stepfather of the young girl Baum had been visiting just before she disappeared have both taken voluntary polygraph tests to aid the investigation.

“They asked to be polygraphed so that we would be comfortable with what we were being told and we could move on to other things,” Scott said. “They did not want us to be wasting valuable time.”

Scott said he was “comfortable” with their answers.

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Grays Harbor County Undersheriff Rick Scott says the evidence is pointing more and more to an abduction scenario, but he has no proof one way or another and will not call off the continuing search of hard-to-get-to brush and waterways.

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“We have her coming back from the residence alone consistent with the friend and friend’s family,” Scott said. “We cannot put her to the main street here or to the street in front of her house. This wasn’t somebody who said she saw someone who looks like (Lindsey) or might have been; she was very confident it was Lindsey because she knew her and was on her way to work.”

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Scott said investigators have gone door to door and are looking for everyone who may have been home along Maple Street and Mommsen Road. Even if neighbors weren’t home, Scott said he wants to know where they were.
Scott said investigators have touched base or are touching base with the half dozen or so registered sex offenders in the McCleary area.

“We’re not just looking for the sex offenders who live in the City of McCleary but those sex offenders considered transient and have not provided a permanent address and those who have ties to east Grays Harbor,” he said

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Scott said his official search team consists of 25 to 30 law enforcement officers and 45 search and rescue experts with German shepherds, blood hounds, dive tanks and special gear.

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