Police converged on Fairlawn Rehabilitation Hospital in Worcester on Monday, Aug. 24, as the search for Karen Solomon entered its seventh day and attention shifted to another part of the city near Coes Pond. The area around the rehabilitation hospital at 189 May St. was blocked off, and an ambulance left around 2:30 p.m. as officers maintained a large presence at the scene.
The search was not happening in a vacuum. Worcester County District Attorney Joseph D. Early Jr. was expected to update the case at a 4 p.m. press conference, giving authorities a set time to explain what had been found, if anything, after a day of intense activity. Karen Solomon had remained missing nearly a week after her husband, Officer Kurt Solomon, was found dead at their Wildwood Avenue home.
By Monday morning, the effort around Coes Pond had already widened. A state police boat with a tracking dog was on the water early, a drone was near the pond, and by noon the number of law enforcement officers in the area had increased. In the early afternoon, divers from the Worcester Fire Department joined the search. Joseph D. Early Jr. was also on the scene in the late morning, underscoring how much of the day was being spent trying to narrow a search that had already stretched across much of the area around the pond.
That search, though, carried a contradiction investigators still had not resolved. Surveillance video from a business on Mill Street next to Coes Pond showed Karen Solomon in night clothes soon after her husband was killed, placing her near the pond early in the timeline. Yet by Monday afternoon she still had not been located. The focus on Coes Pond made sense because it is within walking distance of the couple's house at 217 Wildwood Ave., but the video detail suggested investigators were chasing a trail that had already gone cold.
The city had already closed Coes Pond Beach, also known as Binienda Beach, along with Columbus Park, the Columbus Park Boardwalk, Knights of Columbus Park, Coes Park Playground and Stearns Tavern until further notice because of the search. Worcester police and other officers were also expected to pay respects to Officer Kurt Solomon during the week, with visiting hours set for Tuesday and his funeral scheduled for Wednesday. The 4 p.m. update was the moment when authorities were expected to say whether the day’s police activity at Fairlawn had moved the case forward or simply marked another stop in a search that had not yet found Karen Solomon.
