Victim’s Grieving Loved Ones Find Some Solace in Support : Crime: An army of volunteers joined the relentless search for Kellie O’Sullivan over rugged terrain. Family, friends did all they could to keep hope alive.

Kellie O’Sullivan’s disappearance two weeks ago today plunged her family into shock.

That state lasted but a few hours.

By the next morning, they were on the move, printing and handing out 20,000 flyers with her photo and asking for help in finding the 34-year-old Westlake nurse who had failed to pick up her 5-year-old son from school on Sept. 14.

Before they knew it, they had a small army of volunteers who gave more generously than they could have hoped.

At the peak of the search on Saturday, about 275 civilians linked by cellular phones joined more than 30 Ventura County Sheriff’s Department personnel in a net that spread across 170 square miles of the rugged Santa Monica Mountains around Thousand Oaks.

People lent telephones and helicopters to the search. Water companies donated water and copy shops duplicated the leaflets free of charge. Party suppliers provided colored crepe paper that searchers tied to brush to mark the areas they had searched, a different color for each day the hunt continued.

O’Sullivan’s neighbors prepared hundreds of sandwiches each day to feed searchers who convened at the sheriff’s makeshift command post at the old Thousand Oaks city hall for their marching orders.

Then on Sunday morning, two people who had joined the search just 45 minutes earlier found the decaying body of a blond woman clad in a white nurse’s uniform in a rocky notch off Mulholland Highway.

The Los Angeles County coroner’s office confirmed Monday that the woman was Kellie O’Sullivan and that she had been shot to death.

Bound tightly together for 12 days to focus on the search, O’Sullivan’s family said they were relieved to finally learn her fate and looked back on the extensive search they inspired for the vivacious young woman they loved.

“I’m still numb,” said her mother, Sharlene Cunningham. “I don’t want to collapse. I want to be here for all the people who were here for Kellie.”

“It’s been incredible, the donations and just the contributions of people’s time,” said Kevin White, O’Sullivan’s boyfriend. “I know dozens of people who didn’t go to work all week. A lot of people figured it could be their girlfriend, their wife.”

Her ex-husband, Cliff O’Sullivan, said he told their 5-year-old son Sunday night what had happened.

“He told me a couple days ago he had a dream that the bad guy killed mom,” O’Sullivan said. “Last night I told him he was right. He put his arms around my neck and he said, ‘I believe you, Daddy.’ ”

The household where Kellie O’Sullivan lived jelled quickly into a command post. It dispatched searchers into the mountains, supplied them with food and fielded hundreds of calls from reporters, detectives, well-wishers and tipsters.

There were false alarms and freak discoveries. Searchers who heard moaning emanating from a canyon found a wounded bobcat. Others came upon a fully rigged, clandestine narcotics lab that was pointed out to detectives for investigation. The searchers discovered dozens of campsites used by homeless people.

At times, worries about Kellie’s ordeal would overwhelm the family’s sense of purpose, Cliff O’Sullivan said, and they had to talk each other out of immobility.

“Each of us would go through a well of desperation, and the other night Kevin kicked my ass and helped me kind of push through it. I have a lot of respect for him,” O’Sullivan said. “In that entire 12-day period, none of us fought with each other, which when you have an entire group of headstrong people together is unusual.”

Kellie O’Sullivan’s birthday last week was especially hard to deal with, White said.

“I was afraid we’d find her on her birthday,” he said. “We drank a few drinks for her, and we went on.”

Peter Greaney, who shared the house with White and Kellie O’Sullivan, said the group tried to avoid expressing their worst fears--that O’Sullivan would be found dead.

“I hoped she wasn’t suffering,” Greaney said. “I had no illusions from the start--most of these cases I believe turn out badly. . . . But I couldn’t say anything about it because there’s always hope.”

At times, the phone at Kellie O’Sullivan’s airy suburban tract house in Westlake rang repeatedly with calls from self-proclaimed psychics who said they could envision her tied up, or alive somewhere in a vaguely described place.

“We had so many psychics calling we joked about setting up a hot line: 1-800-WE-KNOW,” White said.

Finally, they assigned someone to handle the calls because they were demoralizing the family, Greaney said.

Yet through it all, the family was overwhelmed by the outpouring of support from people who had never met O’Sullivan and the extensive resources focused on finding her.

“We can’t possibly say enough about the volunteers,” said her mother. “I felt like I was in a little city, or on the set at the filming of ‘Ben-Hur,’ with the helicopters and telephones and everything. It’s like all the ego stuff and self-centeredness fell away. It was about unity. It was about finding Kellie.”

O’Sullivan said: “It’s changed my life the way people have just kind of reached out.”

A memorial service for Kellie O’Sullivan is scheduled for 10:30 a.m. Saturday at St. Jude’s Catholic Church, 320302 Lindero Canyon Road, Westlake.

FYI

Donors wishing to help pay for gas, food, telephones, aviation fuel and other expenses remaining from the search may send money to Great Western Bank, c/o Kellie O’Sullivan, 23703 Calabasas Road, Calabasas, 91302.