The body of a Purdue student missing since early Sunday was found today submerged in his car in a Fishers neighborhood retention pond, police say.
The vehicle driven by Patrick Trainor, 19, Indianapolis, was identified by family members gathered in the Fishers neighborhood of Breakwater, near 116th Street and Brooks School Road.
Fishers Fire Department spokesman Ron Lipps said authorities pulled the car from the pond about 3 p.m.
Police said they found no tire tracks leading from the road into the pond, which is about 20 feet from the road.
Trainor’s family identified the body. They declined comment.
In West Lafayette, more than 200 friends and supporters gathered Wednesday night at Sagamore Ridge Apartments for a candlelight vigil. They prayed, shared a moment of silence and wrote messages to Trainor on a large banner stretched in front of the apartment complex, which is managed by a friend of Trainor’s family.
“We’re here to support Patrick, his friends and his family through this difficult time,” said Danielle Champagne, event organizer. “We’re a community here, and this vigil is a simple way for us to come together.”
Purdue freshman and fellow Beta Theta Pi member Tom McGrath said the vigil was planned before Trainor’s body was found Wednesday. Emotionally, the ceremony came at a crucial time.
“We really appreciate all of the support. From the search efforts to everything else,” he said. “Pat was one of the strongest, most easygoing guys I have ever met, and he will be greatly missed.”… Read full story here
NEWARK, N.J. — One night in 1978, five teenage boys disappeared without a trace in what would become one of the longest and most baffling missing-persons cases New Jersey has ever seen.
Thirty-two years later, prosecutors announced the arrests of two men and disclosed the victims’ gruesome fate: They were herded at gunpoint into an abandoned building in a dispute over missing drugs and burned to death in a blaze that obliterated nearly all evidence.
“For years, their families have wondered what happened on that August day,” acting Essex County Prosecutor Robert Laurino said Tuesday. “Today, we believe that question has been answered.”
A relative of one of the victims said that one of the men charged with the crimes, 56-year-old Lee Evans, confessed to him 18 months ago, setting investigators on the task of corroborating the confession. On Tuesday, authorities would only say that a witness came forward then but didn’t give details.
“He just told me what happened,” Rogers Taylor, brother of Ernest Taylor, told reporters Tuesday.
Over the years, investigators conducted a nationwide search for the teens, chased hundreds of dead-end leads and enlisted at least two psychics. In the end, the evidence led back to a site just blocks from where the victims were last seen, in the same neighborhood where four of the teens lived, played and went to high school together.
Investigators believe that’s where two boys were taken into an abandoned house, followed later by three more. It was not known what pretense was used to get them to the house.
Laurino said the men restrained the boys and then set the house on fire. The five were believed to have died from the flames and not from gunshots, he said.
The house was destroyed in the blaze, as were houses on either side of it, Laurino said. The five bodies were never found, possibly because no one thought to look for remains in an unoccupied home. The boys were not reported missing until two days later.
Arrested late Monday were Evans, of nearby Irvington, who routinely hired teenagers to help with odd jobs; and Philander Hampton, 53, of Jersey City. They allegedly acted in retaliation for the theft of some marijuana.
Each is charged with five counts of murder and one count of arson. Both were being held on $5 million bail ahead of an arraignment scheduled for Wednesday. Prosecutors did not know whether the suspects had attorneys.
Both men were questioned after the boys disappeared, but neither was charged. Evans passed a lie-detector test… Read full story here
The 24-year-old woman disappeared Sept. 17 after being released from the Lost Hills/Malibu Sheriff’s Station. Her parents have filed negligence claims against L.A. County.
In the six months since Mitrice Richardson vanished in rugged Malibu Canyon, detectives have tracked reported sightings of her. Searchers have combed a total of 40 square miles looking for any sign of her — alive or dead.
U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters (D- Los Angeles) called for the FBI’s involvement, and Los Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas asked the Sheriff’s Department to review the policies that led to the release of the Cal State Fullerton graduate from the custody of the Lost Hills/Malibu Sheriff’s Station shortly after midnight Sept. 17, 2009, without her car, purse or cellphone.
But none of that has assuaged her frustrated parents, who on Tuesday — the day before the six-month mark of their daughter’s disappearance — stood in front of the county’s Hall of Administration and criticized what they see as authorities moving slowly on the search and politicians ignoring them.
Richardson, 24, was arrested at Geoffrey’s, a Malibu restaurant, for not paying an $89 dinner bill. Patrons and staffers said that she had acted bizarrely that night. Since her disappearance, detectives with the Los Angeles Police Department have discovered evidence that she had been suffering from a severe bipolar disorder. Deputies who arrived to arrest her described her as “coherent and rational,” said L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca in a letter to the Board of Supervisors…Read Full Story
MINNEAPOLIS — A new online database promises to crack some of the nation’s 100,000 missing persons cases and provide answers to desperate families, but only a fraction of law enforcement agencies are using it.
The clearinghouse, dubbed NamUs (Name Us), offers a quick way to check whether a missing loved one might be among the 40,000 sets of unidentified remains that languish at any given time with medical examiners across the country. NamUs is free, yet many law enforcement agencies still aren’t aware of it, and others aren’t convinced they should use their limited staff resources to participate.
Janice Smolinski hopes that changes — and soon. Her son, Billy, was 31 when he vanished five years ago. The Cheshire, Conn., woman fears he was murdered, his body hidden away.
She’s now championing a bill in Congress, named “Billy’s Law” after her son, that would set aside more funding and make other changes to encourage wider use of NamUs. Only about 1,100 of the nearly 17,000 law enforcement agencies nationwide are registered to use the system, even though it already has been hailed for solving 16 cases since it became fully operational last year.
“As these cases become more well known, as people learn about the successes of NamUs, more and more agencies are going to want to be part of it,” said Kristina Rose, acting director of the National Institute of Justice at the Justice Department.
Before NamUs, families and investigators had to go through the slow process of checking with medical examiner’s offices one by one. As the Smolinski family searched for clues to Billy’s fate, they met a maze of federal, state and nonprofit missing person databases that weren’t completely public and didn’t share information well with each other….
