Posted at: 10/17/2009 6:49 PM | WHEC.com
Updated at: 10/17/2009 8:15 PM
By: Linzi Sheldon

Search back on for Brittanee Drexel

Nearly six months after the Chili teen went missing, the search is back on for Brittanee Drexel.

"You just don't know," mother Dawn Drexel said. "They could find something that could break the case wide open."

On Saturday, search teams combed the area near Georgetown, South Carolina for Brittanee's cell phone and other clues.

Brittanee Drexel went missing in April, while she was on spring break in Myrtle Beach.

Here in Rochester, Drexel's family was at the Mall at Greece Ridge to raise money for the search and also raise awareness for other missing children.

"We think of Brittanee every single minute of the day," Brittanee's grandmother Linda Wolpert said. "There isn't a time that goes by that somebody doesn't talk about Brittanee."

On Saturday, Brittanee's picture was in clear view at the entrance to Macy's.

"Macy's is doing a Shop for a Cause, which is for Brittanee's foundation," Drexel said.

Drexel and Wolpert collected donations all morning and afternoon to help fund the search. All of the money will go to the Cue Center for Missing Persons. Donations over five dollars bought a coupon and savings pass to Macy's for the day.

"I just feel like...it just never ends, you know," Drexel said of the search efforts. "I just want her to come home."

Just south of Georgetown, South Carolina, the center's teams spent Saturday searching more than a dozen acres in the area where Brittanee's cell phone last left a signal.

"They go down to search, and they're trained to search with the dogs, horses, whatever they have in the facilities, whatever they have down there," Wolpert said.

Back home, Dawn Drexel says it's tough to stay positive month after month.

"I've been upset this morning," she said. "It's just with every search, you know, it's difficult."

Wolpert says they've gotten a few new leads but have found no traces of Brittanee.

"Everybody says you know you have faith, believe that she is alive and all that," she said. "You know, which we want to believe, but then there's reality. We don't know anything so it's very hard to know which way to go."

Drexel says it's important to keep hope alive and keep searching-- not just for Brittanee, but for all the other missing children in the country.

"This happens every day," Drexel said. "Twenty-two hundred kids go missing each day. People are just oblivious to it because they don't think it could happen to them. I was the same way but here I'm living proof."

Drexel says the search is expected to continue all day Sunday.