Around 1:20 AM on
Saturday, September 13th, eighteen year-old Hannah Graham
disappeared. Shortly before this, the University of Virginia sophomore was
captured by various surveillance cameras as she walked through the Downtown
Mall, a pedestrian area near the university which is home to a variety of
restaurants, shops, art galleries, and offices. Even at such an early hour, the
eight-block strip still had a decent flow of foot traffic. Yet somehow, after sending
a text to friends informing them that she was lost, Hannah disappeared without
a trace.
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Nearly a week after she
went missing, volunteers were sought to perform a massive undertaking: to
search the entire city of Charlottesville, Virginia for any signs of the
missing student in the course of a single weekend. Being only a few hours away from the University of Virginia,
my family and I decided to lend our assistance to the effort. After pre-registering
on one of the official sites, we drove up to Charlottesville, picked my
sister up from the train station, and made our way to the search and rescue
command center, which had been set up in the John Paul Jones Arena on the UVA
campus. Once there, a bevy of volunteers directed us to the registration area;
after providing identification and signing a waiver, we were given wrist bands
which we were not allowed to remove and assigned a time to meet on Saturday
morning. After this, we were seated within the arena to await the 7:00 PM
briefing.
Having arrived early, we
watched the seats fill up over the course of several hours. Around 1500 people
had preregistered online with several hundred more showing up to register in
person. The turnout was so large in fact, that organizers had to forgo the
official registration process for a large number of volunteers until after the
conference had concluded. For this same reason, the meeting also started a
little later than initially planned.
Once it began, various search
and rescue officials provided an overview of the operation, advising us of
exactly what we would be looking for and giving some detail of what to expect
when we showed up in the morning. I was most impressed with Police Chief Tim
Longo. Though a very stern and imposing looking man, he was very passionate as
he addressed the crowd of volunteers as well as optimistic. He, and the others,
repeatedly stressed that the point of the search was to bring Hannah home. He
did, however, share some legal information pertinent to what we’d be doing. Some
of it was fairly obvious, such as not touching anything we found which may be
of evidentiary value. However, we were also advised about private property.
Though we couldn’t enter private property without risking anything found there
being inadmissible, we were free to
look into and even photograph the yards if we were standing on a public street
or sidewalk.
After the meeting
concluded, the remainder of the volunteers stayed behind to finish registration
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| At the mission briefing |
while we went to find some dinner and check into our hotel. Knowing an arduous
day would be before us, we called it a night fairly early, ensuring we would be
well-rested for the coming day.
Saturday morning, it was
boots on the ground at 9:00 AM. We met back at the arena and had to go through
registration again, this time also providing the unique ID number printed on
our wristbands as well as our names. Once this was accomplished, we were seated
in a staging area within the arena. From there, volunteers with previous search
and rescue, first responder, or military experience were identified and
separated from the pack, being taken to a separate briefing so they could serve as team
leaders. The rest of us were advised that that the searches would be divided
into roughly two types of areas: wooded terrain and urban. As my family and I are
avid hikers, we volunteered for the heavy terrain regions, reasoning that we would
more readily be able to identify things which looked out of place or unusual in
a forest setting.
From these two distinct groups, we were further broken down into teams of six to ten individuals. Each
team had a team leader, as previously mentioned, as well as a communications officer, who
was responsible for keeping in contact with the command center, checking in at
predetermined intervals, and reporting anything of interest which was found. Our
team consisted of my stepdad, mom, sister, and me, as well as three young men
from a nearby town who all serve in the army together.
Once assembled, we went
over a map of the area we would be searching, an overview of what type of
terrain we could expect, and were advised it would take around four hours to
thoroughly search our assigned territory. After the briefing was concluded, our
team loaded onto a bus and was driven to our drop point.
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| Some of the terrain we were searching |
Our area consisted of a
meandering foot path that was roughly parallel to the Highway 250 Bypass. In
places the woods were extremely thick with briars and brambles blocking the way
as well as steep inclines to contend with. We’d fanned out through the area,
moving slowly, methodically, and literally leaving no stone left unturned. We
stooped to peer beneath the underbrush, scattered piles of leaves, and shined
our flashlights into drainage culverts which fed into small streams. We
searched stone cisterns so old that the forest had nearly overtaken them and
walked the perimeter of a stagnant pond. A little ways of from the trail, I
came across a tent set up in a small clearing with pieces of duct tape
littering the ground. With our team leader, we called out multiple times asking
if anyone was in the tent and then advising them that we were opening it up. Inside,
there were only some flattened boxes. It looked for all intents and purposes to
be the encampment of a homeless person, but pictures were still taken and sent
back to the command center just in case. Fanning out again, my sister and mom
discovered a pile of bones which were eventually confirmed to be deer but had
to be ruled out anyway, since at least five girls have gone missing
from this area in the last five years with only one ever actually being
recovered. While the rest of the team waited for someone to show up to look at
the bones, one of the team members and I set out to follow some tire tracks I’d
discovered fairly close to the pond and which looked to be approximately a week
old. Though that search proved fruitless, we later learned that divers were
going to be dispatched to the pond.
I’d volunteered to be
part of this search because I felt for Hannah’s family. They are living through
every parent’s worst nightmare and if there was anything I could do to help
alleviate even a fraction of that stress and worry, I was all in. What I didn't
take into account, however, was the psychological and emotional impact these
types of operations have. It didn't take long before it almost began feeling
like Hannah was someone I personally knew, a friend of the family or perhaps a cousin whom I
hadn’t seen for some time. This emotional connection with a girl I’d never
actually met sometimes made the task of searching difficult.
The search organizers and
police were all extremely optimistic. The official name of the project was “Bring
Hannah Home”, but that was also our stated goal: to find this young woman and
bring her back. Hannah, however, had disappeared from an urban area, not while
walking along the dirt trail which formed the backbone of our search radius. Though
no one came right out and openly said it, I think it was probably in the back
of all of our minds: out there in the woods, we weren't searching for a living
girl who was being held captive. We were searching for a body. We searched with
our noses as well as our eyes. We watched hawks as they flew across the sky to
see if they began circling. We tried to remain optimistic. We tried to
remain hopeful. But it was hard at times.
Once we’d reached the end
of the woods, we crossed the highway and headed back toward the rendezvous
point, searching the hillside and berm for anything which may have been tossed
from a moving vehicle. Every so often, cars would honk their horns and give us
a thumb’s up as they passed and this outpouring of community support is what
really choked me up. I’m not really sure why. It was just one of those
emotional triggers that appear when you least expect it. But that was when I
truly realized exactly how deeply this operation was affecting me.
Once we returned to the
command center, our team leaders went to a debriefing while we refilled our
backpacks with bottled water and snacks as well as hungrily devouring pizza,
all thoughtfully provided by The American Red Cross. We’d been combing the
woods for four hours and were required to take a half an hour break before
being allowed another assignment. Once that half an hour had passed, however,
our team reassembled, had a mini-briefing concerning our new search area and
objectives, and then it was boots on the ground again.
This time our search area
was more urban. While it did include some wooded plots, we mostly
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| Bravo-25 |
walked
through neighborhoods, checking storm drains, dumpsters, piles of leaves and
brush, and even shining our flashlights into the commodes of Porta-potties. In
this area, our main goal was to find evidence: Hannah’s clothing, her shoes,
her iPhone… anything which would help generate leads for the police. However
after nearly another four hours our search was complete and we began walking
back to the command center. I found, however, that the search is never really complete.
As we walked along the sidewalks, our eyes were still scanning our
surroundings. My stepdad still checked rain gutters along the roadway and we
veered away from the sidewalks to look through areas of dense vegetation.
Eventually,
though we trudged back onto the UVA campus. With only a couple hours of
daylight remaining, no more groups were being sent out, so we checked out with
the registration volunteers and found a small, English pub to have a bite of
dinner. While smoking in the parking lot, however, I still found myself drawn
to the hillsides, my eyes searching the trees and creek below for the metallic
sparkle of her shirt, her phone’s pink casing, or her white shoes.
We were all profoundly disappointed.
We’d wanted so desperately for Hannah to be found; it didn’t necessarily even
have to be our group which found her. At the very least, we wanted something to be found. While we did hear
several promising reports come over the radio throughout the search, at the end
of the day there was still no trace of Hannah Elizabeth Graham. With heavy
hearts and minds, we made the long journey home, physically and emotionally
exhausted.
A $50,000 reward is now being offered
in hopes of soliciting tips that could lead police to Hannah Graham.
The City of Charlottesville
and the University of Virginia are each offering $10,000. In addition, some
local residents and businesses have contributed $30,000 to the reward.
If you have information
that could help investigators, call the special Hannah Graham tip line at
434-295-3851.
