Imaging Gear Used in Search for Athlete

Authorities searching for a missing Baylor University basketball player returned to a 50-acre property northeast of the campus Thursday with thermal imaging equipment.

“We just want to make sure we haven’t missed anything,” Waco Police spokesman Steve Anderson said. He later said the aerial search had turned up nothing.

The owner of the property has said the missing basketball player, Patrick James Dennehy II, and his roommate and former teammate Eric Carlton Dotson had fired guns on the land in recent months.

No charges have been filed in Dennehy’s disappearance; however, authorities have described Dotson as a “person of interest.” A search warrant affidavit made public Monday said an unnamed informant told investigators that Dotson told a cousin he shot Dennehy with a handgun while the two played with firearms near Waco.

Dennehy, 21, was last heard from almost three weeks ago. His sport utility vehicle was later found abandoned without its license plates in a Virginia Beach, Va., parking lot.

The landowner, who spoke to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram on condition of anonymity, said Dotson visited the property more than 30 times between March 1 and June 1. Dotson and Dennehy got to know his family after answering an ad to buy a pit bull, and they returned to the property to fish, fire weapons and play with the family’s sons.

“They were like family,” the man said. “I wouldn’t have let them be around my boys if I didn’t feel that way.”

The man said that he taught the two basketball players how to fish, and his wife described them as “well-behaved and well-mannered.”

The last time the man said he saw Dotson and Dennehy at his property was in early June. His wife and children said they saw them in Waco on June 12.