Body believed to be missing girl’s is found
Searchers discover what police believe to be 16-year-old whose mother, sister were slain
Searchers discover a body in a wooded area believed to be that of a 16-year-old girl whose mother and sister were found slain in their Baytown home.
Kirsten Fritch was born on a sunny day. She entered the world with silky fine blond hair and almond-shaped eyes still noticeable in pictures 16 years later.
“She was just a beautiful baby,” Audri-Anne Sweatt remembered on Thursday.
“I video recorded Kirsten when her father held her for the first time,” Sweatt said. “I clipped her fingernails for the first time.”
Over the years, Sweatt watched her best friend’s baby grow into a gregarious young woman who played violin in the Goose Creek Memorial High School orchestra and dreamed of studying medicine.
Then on Tuesday she heard the news: Her friend, Cynthia Morris, 37, was found shot and killed at her Baytown home along with her 13-year-old daughter, Breanna Pavlicek. Medical examiners said Thursday that Morris was shot in the torso and neck while Breanna had gunshots to the head, neck and right shoulder.
Morris’ car was missing. And so was Kirsten, until searchers found her body Thursday.
Friends and family had held onto the hope that Kirstin might be alive. Police issued an Amber Alert and identified a person of interest — Kirsten’s 21-year-old boyfriend, Jesse Dobbs.
Dobbs was arrested Tuesday night after he came in to a Texas City bar, reportedly wet and shoeless. He refused to cooperate with investigators.
On Wednesday, DPS and the
FBI helped local police search the bar’s immediate surroundings, but they found nothing.
Thursday morning, police called in Texas Equusearch. Three-dozen volunteers responded to the call. Equusearch founder Tim Miller said that, given the recent rains, searchers hoped to spot fresh footprints or tire tracks.
Miller, whose own daughter’s abduction and murder three decades ago led him to start Equusearch, had a message for Kirsten’s loved ones: “They’re not alone right now, in the very worst time of their life.”
Kirsten had been missing for about 48 hours, making it less likely she would be found alive.
“It’s just a little sliver of hope,” Miller said. “But we do believe in miracles.”
They came with a half-dozen ATVs, an RV command center and a boat. The search started shortly after noon. They were ready to keep looking until it got too dark to see anything. But within half an hour, the search was over.
“We found her,” Miller told his volunteers. His face was grim.
Less than a thousand feet from the bar, volunteers on ATVs found a body in the underbrush of a wooded area. The body was almost certainly Kirsten’s, Baytown police Lt. Steve Dorris said about 2:30 p.m. He did not say whether the body had any apparent injuries or gunshot wounds.
Dobbs, who is being held in the Galveston County Jail, is the only suspect in all three deaths. Dorris said he never cooperated with investigators, instead asking for a lawyer.
Police are preparing to file murder charges against Dobbs, Dorris said. After reviewing evidence, prosecutors will decide whether to elevate them to capital murder. Authorities did not give a motive.
Sweatt, the family friend, said Morris almost called the police about Kirsten’s relationship with Dobbs, a man five years her senior.
“I would have called the police if it had been my daughter — but she knew there was something wrong with him, so she was nervous,” Sweatt said.
The pair hadn’t been dating long, but neither family approved of the relationship, according to Sweatt.
“They wanted to break up this relationship. He was too old for her. It was inappropriate,” the 46-year-old said.
Though Sweatt now lives in Seattle, she and Morris met 26 years years ago in Baytown, where they both grew up.
They were part of a tight-knit circle when they met, but as they got older, married and had children, the two women stayed close.
Morris worked at her stepfather’s gun-holstering business and sold crystals on the side, through an online Etsy store.
She was a single mother to her two daughters, whom Sweatt tearfully described in glowing terms.
Thirteen-year-old Breanna, who went by Bree, played cello and loved animals.
“That’s the most heartbreaking part of all this — she was just a child,” Sweatt said, choking up.
She said Kirsten was “right at that age where she was just trying to find herself.”
Kirsten had planned to go to college.
“That was never a question,” Sweatt said. The high school junior talked about a few different career paths but seemed most interested in medicine, possibly as a medical examiner.
On Thursday, police said they were confident the body near the bar was Kirsten’s, but they could not say for sure. That’s up to the medical examiner.