Search Resumes For Body Of Florida Child Believed Buried In Tulsa

The search is back on for a Florida girl believed to have been buried here in Tulsa. Investigators first looked for Ashani Creighton's remains in March near 61st and Mingo.

Now they're back with forensic archeologists to sift through a large pile of dirt and debris.

It's a case that goes back more than a decade. On Monday, specially trained volunteers began what they hope is the final step to find the remains of a 6-year-old girl.

It looks more like a scene from Indiana Jones, but these volunteers and investigators are on a real-life mission.

"The fact that we are dealing with a young child makes this an extremely important case," said Kent Buehler, Oklahoma Archeological Survey.

They're searching for the remains of Ashani Creighton. She was last seen alive in 1997, when she was 4 years old.

She was 6 years old in 1999 when police believe she was killed in Florida. She had been in the custody of her grandparents when she disappeared two years earlier.

Investigators recently got a tip that she was buried behind this strip mall in Tulsa.

The mall was built in 2008, and authorities say there's a chance that work crews may have dug up her remains and scattered them near this brush pile.

3/5/2012 Related Story: Disturbing Details Of Child Abuse Emerge In Tulsa Cold Case

"I don't want to say how confident we are. I fully believe that she is here somewhere," said Corporal Joe Campbell of the Tulsa Police Department.

On Monday, students from the University of Oklahoma Archeological Survey and the OSU Forensics Science program began sifting through the dirt and debris looking for human bones.

"Anything from intact to small fragments," Buehler said.

Kent Buehler is a forensic archeologist. He says the work is not complicated, just time consuming.

"It's almost literally a needle in a haystack in this case, except we have a dirt stack instead of hay. We're just going to go through it very slowly, very carefully, very methodically," he said.

Buehler's students have done this work before, but he admits this case is special because of little Ashani's age and the fact that she's been missing for more than fifteen years.

"We always want to recover the bodies or the remains as much as we can; this makes it a little more so, I would think," said Kent Buehler, forensic archeologist.

Investigators say they don't know how long this process will take, but they plan to be out here for at least the entire week.

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