After the agents of the law spent days touring a remote section of the state of Washington by a father accused of killing his three young daughters, the local sheriff who runs the hunt consulted the search to the federal authorities, the authorities said on Monday.
Since last week, the search for Travis Decker, 32, has covered hundreds of square miles for air, land and water, said the Sheriff’s Office of Chelan County in a press release, and the department reached the point “where we need to rest our local resources.”
“Our command staff continues to be committed to the search command while we give free time to our teams to rest and recover and be prepared to meet with the search and capture of the suspect,” said the Sheriff’s office.
The Sheriff’s office is still the main agency in criminal investigation into the death of the three daughters of Decker, Evelyn, 8, Paityn, 9, and Olivia Decker, 5, said the department.
The girls were found dead on June 2 near a camp east of Seattle after Decker could not return them for a visit three days before. An arrest warrant accuses him of first degree and kidnapping murder.
An autopsy completed on Friday attributed the cause of death of girls to suffocation, according to Monday’s statement. A detective previously wrote in an affidavit in support of an arrest warrant that had bags on their heads and had been tied with zipper.
Two bloody footprints were found in the White Decker truck, which was found near the girls, and one of the blood samples recovered from the scene belonged to a man, the department said. Another blood sample was not human.
The department said that additional DNA and digital fingerprints are being performed.
The authorities said they have collected a lot of evidence of the scene, along with Decker’s dog, which was delivered to a local animal rescue.
The authorities described previously Decker, a military veteran and active member of the National Guard of Washington, as an outdoor man who knows that he is going “out of the network” for months. The Sheriff has warned people with cabins in the area to block their doors and leave their lights on at night.
The affidavit shows that Decker’s ex -wife, Whitney Decker, described her relationship with her ex -husband as cordial and said she had never failed to return her children. A parenting plan imposed by a court last year demanded that he seek mental health treatment and advice on domestic violence management, but had not done so and refused to sign the plan, according to the affidavit.
Since the girls were found dead, Whitney Decker has asked for reforms to the Amber Alert System, which sends text messages to all cell phones in the area of the missing children, but was not used after she told the authorities that her ex -husband had violated her aging plan.
An agency spokesman who manages the system, the Washington state patrol, said that an alert request from local authorities did not meet the strict criteria required by the Federal Program.
