A third person has been arrested on suspicion of helping a fugitive accused of killing four relatives of a Tennessee baby who was found abandoned alive last week, authorities said Monday.
Meanwhile, authorities were scouring a wooded area near a private university in Jackson, Tennessee, on Monday afternoon as part of the investigation into the suspect in the killings, 28-year-old Austin Robert Drummond, a law enforcement source familiar said.
As for the latest arrest: Dearrah Sanders, 23, was taken into custody Monday on warrants charging her with accessory after the fact to first-degree murder, accused of assisting Drummond after the killings of the baby’s relatives, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation said. Sanders will be booked into the Lake County Jail, the TBI said, and it is unclear if she has obtained an attorney.
The same charges were also filed last week against Tanaka Brown and Giovonti Thomas, both 29. Brown is also charged with tampering with evidence, according to the TBI. Authorities have not specified precisely what the three are accused of doing to help Drummond.
Drummond remains on the lam, but authorities investigating the case were searching a wooded area Monday near Union University in Jackson – the same western Tennessee city where authorities say a vehicle associated with him was found unoccupied last week. At the request of police, the university locked exterior doors to all buildings, university spokesperson Tim Ellsworth said Monday afternoon.
A private school less than a mile from the university – Jackson Christian School – was on lockdown Monday afternoon, a receptionist told CNN. Because the school year starts Thursday, teachers, but not students, were at the school, which covers pre-K through grade 12.
Drummond is sought in connection with the deaths of James M. Wilson, 21; Adrianna Williams, 20; Cortney Rose, 38; and Braydon Williams, 15, whose bodies were found July 29 in Tiptonville, a town in northwest Tennessee’s Lake County, the TBI said.
The four were found dead hours after the baby daughter of Wilson and Adrianna Williams was found abandoned on the afternoon of July 29 in a car seat in a “random” front yard near the Dyer County community of Tigrett, nearly a 40-mile drive southeast of Tiptonville, authorities had said.
Jackson is about 45 miles southeast of Tigrett. A second vehicle sought in the hunt for Drummond, a 1988 white Ford pickup truck with a red stripe, was located in Dyer County, the TBI said Saturday.
The TBI hasn’t said what led it to name Drummond as a suspect, or whether investigators know of a motive in the killings or why the baby was abandoned a county away from where the bodies were found.
Rose was the baby’s maternal grandmother, and Braydon Williams was the baby’s maternal uncle, according to Danny Goodman, district attorney for Dyer and Lake counties.
“The victims were all from Dyer County, and we suspect the person that killed them knew all of them,” Goodman, who also confirmed Wilson and Adrianna Williams were the baby’s parents, told CNN last week.
Warrants for Drummond have been issued charging him with four counts of first-degree murder, one count of aggravated kidnapping, four counts of felon in possession of a firearm and one count of possession of a firearm during the commission of a dangerous felony, the TBI said.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
CNN’s Cindy Von Quednow and Lily Hautau contributed to this report.
