Authorities believe they have found the body of a missing Carroll County woman, Debra Hooper, whose vehicle was apparently washed from the road during flooding last week.

Douglas County Sheriff Phil Miller said a female body was found Monday afternoon downstream in Mobley Creek, off State Highway 5, from where deputies earlier discovered Hooper’s mangled Jeep Liberty.

Miller said he could not say for sure it was Hooper’s body until positive identification is made by the State Crime Lab in Atlanta. She would become the 10th victim statewide of the flooding.

Although a formal search for Hooper was suspended Monday, Douglas County officials said a crew continued to look for her and found the body at about 3 p.m. Monday about three miles from where her vehicle was discovered last week.

Hooper left the Villa Rica home of a friend around 9:30 p.m. on Sept 20 as heavy rains began flooding area roads.

Sheriff’s officials said the woman’s purse, containing her identification, was found in the submerged 2005 Jeep Liberty.

The vehicle was found last Friday by a helicopter pilot near the junction of Mobley Creek and the Dog River.

Hooper, 44, of Whitesburg, was last seen on Sept. 20 around 9:30 p.m. after visiting a friend in Villa Rica. Four days later, Hooper’s grown daughter filed a missing person report with the Carroll County Sheriff’s Office and reported that she had not been in contact with her mother for several days.

“We immediately started trying to locate the woman,” Cpt. Shane Taylor of Carroll County Sheriff’s Office said. “On Friday morning, Douglas County Sheriff’s Office called us in reference to a vehicle located near Dog River that was a possible match to the one the woman drove.”

Though authorities located Hooper’s 2005 Jeep Liberty Friday a mile from the bridge where they believed she had been driving, they found no sign of Hooper.

“The search was really difficult because of the weather-related damage in the area,” Taylor said. “There were 10-foot sandbars where there was no sand before.”

When the Friday search ended, police decided to call in a special K9 unit and resume the operation Saturday morning.

The Douglas County Sheriff’s office called Alpha Team K9 Search and Rescue, a non-profit organization that assists law enforcement agencies on the local, state and federal levels in missing-person cases.

“There was limited access to the location, so it was hard for us to even get out there,” Alpha Team President Stuart Samples said. “When we were on site, the search was challenging because of the tremendous amount of debris.”

(The Associated Press contributed to this article.)