Awareness=Answers

Does Stargate have surveillance outside the club? Do any of the businesses around have surveillance cameras? Has anyone checked the alley he was last seen in or by Lake Superior for any of his belongings? This is sad that the list of victims keeps getting longer and longer and we are no closer to figuring out who is doing this. Ugh.

Dogs Continue Search for Missing Teen
On Tuesday, Dave Drozdowski and his yellow labs were ready to get down to business.

“The dogs can obviously smell things differently than people can see,” he said. “It’s just a more thorough search right now.”

Dave is a member of the St. Louis County Rescue Squad, which is helping in the search for Sylvester “Sly” McCurry. Dave’s two dogs, Abe and Otter, are trained to locate anything from a small trace of blood to a body. He uses one dog at a time during a search.

“If I tell him to check something, he’ll check it a little closer,” said Dave.

Officials say they have no evidence that leads them to believe McCurry is dead, but they want to search again. Dave was assigned to the area behind Stargate Night Club, the last place McCurry was seen.

Dave says he can tell by his dogs’ behavior whether they’re following a scent.

“You can kind of read the dog,” he said. “He’ll get real excited, but his final alert would be to sit.”

Quickly into the search, Abe honed in on a house about 100 feet from Stargate.

Dave says it was obvious Abe smelled something suspicious. As he’s trained to do, he sat down.

Seeing Abe’s reaction, Dave brought his second dog over to the same area. Watch the video of Otter’s reaction.

The dogs’ reactions sparks Dave’s interest, but he was quick to admit they could be smelling something unrelated to Sly’s disappearance.

“Animals are wrong sometimes,” he said.

Dave said there were plenty of other explanations for his dogs’ behavior.

“I’m just throwing out a scenario…but if someone got in a fight and got a bloody nose and sat here, [Abe] would find that blood,” he said. “So you never know if it’s something or nothing.”

The house was vacant, but officers were able to locate the owner, who came to unlock the door. Police and the dogs searched inside and found nothing. Coincidentally, the owner of the house says a man died of natural causes inside several years ago.

So with no sign of Sly, the search teams continued on. They planned on searching other areas in the north end of Superior, hoping somewhere else might yield more clues.

http://www.wdio.com/article/stories/s1385715.shtml?cat=10335

If you watch the video on the link, the newsperson says “it was a false alarm”. Yes, they didn’t find McCurry, but what if he was in the vacant house at one time??

@jbrown

I thought the same thing and then wondered if the dog was able to pick up on the death from a few years earlier. Search dogs are so amazing. Thanks for sharing that fascinating link!

Monique,
It would be interesting to know if the family gave the dogs something of McCurry’s to smell. I also think they should do a more thorough search of that house. Maybe use luminol or something. I know LE in Duluth/Superior are doing a lot more for him that other victims tho. I still have the horrible feeling that the name of the city, “Superior” means something.

jbrown~ Hi what do you mean by, you think Superior means something?

Like the perpetrators are saying they are “superior” to the police because they can’t be caught. It’s like a game for some people to see how much they can get away with before they are caught thinking they are smarter than everyone else.

Ok I see what you are saying, You know before Jan 17th I was unaware that there was THIS many missing teens. Its sad and I feel like I have been in the dark, On Jan 17th my nephew Sylvester McCurry went missing. I some how stumbled upon this web site and there he was.The cases are very similar, he honestly just vanished, there are no clues, no leads, no nothing. We are very frustrated and confused. The dogs did have an article of clothing that is slys for the search with the hound dogs, the other dogs were cadaver dogs and the police say the dogs could have been so interested in that house because the home owner could have died in the house, its a vacant house now.
We dont know what to do, we know for a fact he didnt just run away, we believe their is foul play.

@Jennifer

My heart felt sympathy for what you are going through in trying to locate your nephew. The circumstances of his disappearance do seem suspicious and hopefully when he’s located he’ll be okay.

I am not an expert on search dogs by any means but the behavior of each dog seemed to indicate an interest in the vacant house. I hope the police have checked fully into this house. Just because he has not been found does not mean he was not on this property at some point and time. I am wondering if the hound dogs followed his scent to the same place.

I hope the outcome for Sylvester is positive and he is found soon. My prayers are with you and your family.
Have people put up flyers in Duluth, Superior and the surrounding areas?

Jennifer,
I am so sorry about your missing nephew. He is in my prayers that he is found alive very soon. The number of young men who are completely vanishing without a trace are staggering.

A new article on Sly indicated that the scent brought the dogs to the hotel now:

“The day he disappeared was spent swimming, watching playoff football, eating and drinking alcohol at a Superior motel.

It wasn’t a big party Sylvester McCurry and Keegan Couillard had Jan. 17 at the Superior Inn; it was two friends sharing a day before heading out to a Superior nightclub’s no-alcohol party.

Later, McCurry, 18, was kicked out of the Stargate Nightclub for being intoxicated and, it seems, vanished. Police haven’t said where the teens got the alcohol they drank at the motel, but they say they didn’t get any from the Stargate. Police dogs tracked McCurry’s scent to an outer door of the Superior Inn. There, the scent stops, and rumors begin.

All week, rumors have circulated at East High School, where McCurry is a senior, that his body was found in Lake Superior or frozen by a grain elevator. There have been rumors about his disappearance having a connection to gang activity, or that McCurry is hiding out at this house or that.

None of them are true, said Capt. Chad La Lor of the Superior Police Department.

No bodies, let alone McCurry’s, have been found. And there is no credible information linking McCurry’s disappearance to gang activity, he said, although police have looked into it.

“Potentially — rumors are one thing — but if people further those rumors and provide false information to police, they’ll be facing criminal charges,” La Lor said. “It’s not helping find him by any means.”

And it’s hurting McCurry’s friends and family, who have received text messages and phone calls alerting them to rumors.

“It’s a little bit irritating that people would just make things up about somebody’s life,” said Couillard, 18, a 2009 Central High School graduate and a certified nursing assistant in Duluth.

McCurry has been friends with Couillard for several years and has lived with his family since August. A tightly knit relationship has formed between the family and McCurry.

Jennifer Couillard, Keegan’s mother, has had a hard time sleeping, likening the rumors to “torment.” She’s thought about taking her kids’ phones away and keeping them out of school so they don’t hear what’s being spread.

“I feel bad that I couldn’t protect Sylvester from whatever happened to him, and now I feel like I can’t protect my kids and family from these rumors,” she said.

Police have followed dozens of leads during the past two weeks, “all of which basically fizzled out,” La Lor said.

http://www.duluthnewstribune.com/event/article/id/159007/

Jennifer-
thank you very much also for your additional information on this search.

Wishing there would be information on Sly. It seems that his disappearance has now fallen of the radar here in Duluth/Superior. The disappearance needs to stay on the news and what ever else so that people don’t forget he has not been found yet.

I agree AnnFre. The more it’s on the news, the more info we get.

If anyone lives in Duluth and works the afternoon shift, maybe they could case the Superior shore for suspicious vehicles at night. Maybe we can catch someone doing something they shouldn’t be- leaving a hat somewhere or possibly getting rid of a body.

He is from the Chester neighborhood and was at 619 Tower drive. Patrick Mcneil was found at Pier 69 and was from Port Chester

Hi to slys people … He used to stay in the cities in minnesota so u should try getting ahold of people from crosswinds an the other schools he went to