Volunteers joined law enforcement officers Friday for a second day to walk the perimeter of a partially drained swamp in an attempt to spot any lead in the quest to locate a Vicksburg man last seen May 24.

“We’re looking for clothes, anything that might lead us to him,” Warren County Sheriff Martin Pace said Friday afternoon of the hunt for 31-year-old Jason Allen Ashley, the father of a 6-year-old son.

“He’d been missing 19 days when we found his Cherokee,” Pace said, “so we’re looking for anything, everything.”

Ashley was reported missing May 27, three days after calling his mother, with whom he lived along with his son, to say he would be home soon. He said he had stopped at a restaurant on U.S. 61 North and was playing pool.

A week ago, on June 11, Ashley’s Jeep Cherokee, which he had purchased about a week before his disappearance, was found off Floweree Road near Warren County’s line with Issaquena. Pace said no signs of a struggle were found near the vehicle. He said the vehicle was about three miles from Ashley’s home.

On Friday, Pace said, deputies from his office and agents with the Mississippi Department of Wildlife and Fisheries were joined by about 10 volunteers, mostly family and friends, to walk around the swamp land at Mahannah Wildlife Management Area, which had been drained about three feet on Wednesday.

“We did an expanding circle search, where you move the loop out,” Pace said. “We searched Friday, Saturday, Sunday, every day, and I’ve searched from the air three times.”

On Thursday, about 20 volunteers, deputies and game wardens walked and rode 4-wheelers and horses as far into the swamp land as the mushy ground would permit. “It’s still like walking on oatmeal,” Pace said.

As the search continued into the late afternoon, the sheriff said he expected it to resume this morning.

He said the largest number of law enforcement officers involved in the search so far came on Sunday, when “deputies and game wardens walked shoulder-to-shoulder on both sides the levee near where the Jeep was found.”

He said volunteers are being briefed on physical directions and safety and are traveling in groups of at least two to avoid the potential of another being lost in the heavily overgrown land.

The drainage exposed earth in a borrow pit that flows into Hog Bayou, which feeds into the Mississippi River.

Mahannah Wildlife Management Area is a 12,695-acre preserve that crosses the Warren and Issaquena county line about 18 miles north of Vicksburg. Managed and funded by the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks, the preserve is part of one of the most ecologically intact and biologically diverse bottomland hardwood ecosystems in the Mississippi Delta. Home to one of the largest concentrations of wintering waterfowl in the state, the area is also inhabited by deer, wild hogs, alligators and a variety of snakes.