Cycle found 3 years after owner vanished

Texas police searching for Texarkana remains after likely traffic accident

TEXARKANA -- A motorcycle found Tuesday morning in the brush off Garber Street and Old Buchanan Road was registered to a man missing since March 2012, and cadaver dogs scoured the area, Texas police said.

Steven Curtis Jones, 57, was last seen March 16, 2012, on his purple 1983 Honda Shadow, according to earlier reports in the Texarkana Gazette.

Reports state that Jones had been working in his yard that day and was hot, so "he left for a short ride to cool off."

But Jones never came home.

Sgt. Mike Jones, a police spokesman for Texarkana, Texas, said the scene where the motorcycle was discovered is being investigated as a traffic accident.

"It appears to have been a traffic crash, from everything we see, the bike," Mike Jones said. "There is nothing to indicate anything else."

Bowie County Sheriff James Prince said the Bowie County sheriff's office search and rescue K-9 units and Texarkana, Texas, police worked the scene for clues with at least two mobile crime laboratories after authorities cleared a path to the motorcycle. It was found about 40 feet off of the roadway where the intersection dead-ends at Garber Street.

The city cleared some brush at the edge of the road one day last week, according to authorities, but the brush was still so thick that authorities had to clear a pathway to Jones' motorcycle and any evidence that might be gathered nearby.

A pair of white Nike brand tennis shoes thought to be Jones' was found near the motorcycle, which was lying in the thick brush near some trees and fallen limbs.

Clint "Gene" Stiger, who runs a nearby automotive garage, said he saw silver gleaming on the bike buried in the brush as he was driving by Tuesday morning.

"I walked right past the tennis shoes" and immediately called police upon seeing the motorcycle, Stiger said.

"I knew it was the man who had went missing a few years back," added Stiger, who appeared shaken. "I saw the motorcycle and a backpack laying behind the tree. Man, right here. ... It's crazy this happened right here."

Stiger said he has seen buzzards every day circling the trees near where the motorcycle was found.

"[Someone] told me, 'Look to the sky, Kathy,'" said Kathy Sturdivant, Jones' sister. "You'll see the birds."

Sturdivant said she hopes the search will lead to some semblance of closure for their family.

Jones was just 11 months older than she, and they would often joke about her catching up to him, she said.

"We grew up in this area, and he knew this road," Sturdivant said, remarking that her brother sometimes had seizures, and it's possible he could have had a seizure and run off the road.

"We just never thought he would come down this way," she said.

Jones rarely crossed Lake Drive to the other side of Buchanan Road while riding his motorcycle, Sturdivant said, and her brother "knew these roads like the back of his hands."

Prince said when Jones was reported missing, the Bowie County sheriff's office flew all over the county looking for Jones in the areas he was known to ride his motorcycle, and search crews flew over Miller County, as well.

"I flew with the pilot over Miller County," Prince said. "We never searched inside the city; we searched areas where he was known to ride his motorcycle, from what his family could tell us."

"Nobody thought about right here in the middle of town," he added.

State Desk on 11/26/2015

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