Metallica joins FBI in hunt for missing student
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By Mike Celizic
It has been more than a week since a 20-year-old college student called her friends at a Metallica concert to say she was outside the arena and would find her own way home. Now the famed heavy-metal rockers are participating in the search for her, adding $50,000 to the reward for information leading to her whereabouts.
Morgan went with friends to the concert. Sometime between 8:30 and 9 p.m., she called her friends to say she had gone to the restroom and ended up outside John Paul Jones Arena on the University of Virgina campus in Charlottesville. She told them she wasn’t allowed back in and would find another way home.
The next day, her phone and purse were found in a parking lot near the arena. Morgan, who never went anywhere without her cell phone, hasn’t been seen since.
“We have a purse and we have a cell phone. We have a missing girl,” Lt. Joe Rader of the Virginia State Police, told reporters last week. “We do not know whether if she is alive or has met some ill fate.”
Signing her words in American Sign Language, the mother looked in the camera and said, “Morgan, we are trying to shine our heart to you as a beacon to come through wherever you are. Come back home.”
Boosted by the $50,000 pledge from Metallica, there is a $150,000 reward for information that helps find Morgan Harrington. Police ask anyone with information to call 434-352-3467.
UPDATE TO STORY: January 26, 2010 Morgan’s body was found buried on a farm in Hayfield, VA.