Steven Carrington, named as a suspect in the disappearance of his 12-year-old stepdaughter, also is suspected in the case of a missing 21-year-old man, Fort Bend County Sheriff Milton Wright said Thursday.

State, county and city law enforcement officers and volunteers have conducted an intensive search since Monday for missing Teketria Buggs, Carrington’s stepdaughter, who was last seen Friday night in her rural home on Johnson Road outside the community of Orchard.

Carrington, who lived in the same home along with Teketria’s mother and other family members, was arrested Monday during the search for the missing girl, on unrelated domestic violence charges. He remains in Fort Bend County Jail in lieu of $3,000 bond.

And now, he’s considered a suspect in the disappearance of Corey Brooks, Wright said, who was last seen at a family reunion in 1998.

Brooks’ mother, Carolyn Brooks, said her son was living in the same house as Carrington at the time - on the same rural homestead where Teketria Buggs went missing. Carrington is her cousin.

“That place is a murdering headquarters,” Carolyn Brooks said of the Johnson Road property. “I know they killed my son there.”

She said she has gathered information over the years that leads her to believe her son got into an argument over a girlfriend, that he was shot to death by one person, and that several others helped dispose of the body.

“I got a call on it, that he was buried out in a pasture” on the 12-acre Johnson Road property, Carolyn Brooks said of her son.

“The Corey Brooks case has a file as thick as a telephone book,” Sheriff Wright said Thursday. “We’ve had some leads. We think the body was disposed of in the (Brazos) River. The river was at flood stage right about then. The body could be at the Gulf by now.”

The Brazos also has been a focal point of the search for Teketria. A team with non-profit search-and-rescue organization Texas EquuSearch used a boat equipped with side-screen sonar on the river, and saw imagery they thought may have been a body.

Wright said sheriff’s divers thoroughly explored those areas, and other deep holes in the river beneath a bridge on F.M. 1489, but found nothing.

The sheriff said he doesn’t believe the young girl’s body was dumped into the river. “I think for what it’s worth - call it intuition - that body probably is buried within a radius of five miles” from the girl’s Johnson Road home.

Both Carrington and Teketria’s mother, Laronald Foy, were given polygraph tests, Wright said. He wouldn’t reveal the results. Other family members have not been tested.

While investigators now believe Brooks and Buggs both are dead, neither case is being handled as a murder because “we have nothing,” the sheriff said. No body and no DNA evidence.

And in the case of the Buggs girl, no eye-witnesses.

However, Wright said he believes there were witnesses in the Brooks case, and his hope is that publicity over Teketria’s disappearance will finally prompt witnesses in the earlier case to come forward.

Teketria’s family first reported her missing on Saturday morning. Then, Sunday night, about 45 hours since she was last seen, the sheriff’s department said it had issued an amber alert. Rain and darkness hampered search operations until Monday morning.

Late Thursday afternoon, after another day combing the rural area around Orchard in cold, wet weather, searchers still were unable to turn up any sign of Teketria Buggs.

“This little girl is like an injury to my life,” Carolyn Brooks said, adding that if witnesses to her son’s murder would have come forward years ago, “this little girl would still be alive.”