Investigators said the pair wrote inappropriate messages to each other, but Cooper declined to elaborate.
\"If you read them you would immediately recognize you are reading messages between two people who have a romantic interest in each other,\" Cooper said.
The lead investigator on the case shared one of the emails with WAAY.
\"'I saw you standing next to you backpack this morning' and [Cummins] makes a reference to a body part of hers and how nice that looked,\" said Marcus Alright with the Maury County Sheriff's Department.
Meanwhile, a former coworker of Cummins is offering a $5,000 reward for information leading to his arrest.
Chandler Anderson, a nurse practitioner in Columbia, Tennessee, first met Cummins in 1998. Prior to being a teacher he was a respiratory therapist.
Anderson says he's worried about Thomas.
\"You've got to do something to motivate people to be more vigilant about trying to find this young girl, because this is not going to end well if we don't get her home, and get her home soon,\" he said.
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