A Girl Went Missing

A week ago this past Friday, a UVM student named Michelle went downtown and hung out with her friends at the bars. She headed up Main Street at 2:30 AM, walking with a man she had approached so she could use his cell phone, as her battery had run out. The security camera hanging from Perrywinkel's Jewelers (which used to be Bard Home Design) recorded images of them walking together, chatting - no signs of distress or struggle. It was a walk we have all taken dozens of times - hundreds of times.

The next night, Michelle didn't show up to go for dinner wth her parents, who were visiting for Parents' Weekend. They reported her missing, and so began a week of searching, waiting, praying and worrying. With each passing day the odds that she would somehow turn up alive became less likely, and on Friday the 13th, the fears were realized when her body was found alongside Huntington Gorge in Richmond.

Michelle was just like all of us when we were 21 - well, she was cooler than me, but...the thought that a young woman went downtown and didn't make it home is so unreal to me. It's a horrible tragedy, a terrible loss of life and the end of whatever lingering innocence existed in Burlington.

From the Washington Post:

Student in Vermont Was Outgoing and Lover of Outdoors
Autopsy Pending on Arlington Native
By Brigid Schulte
Washington Post Staff WriterSunday, October 15, 2006; C06
As a college student, Michelle Gardner-Quinn bounced around. She attended American University, Antioch College, the University of Virginia, Hampshire College and Goucher College outside of Baltimore. It was only this fall that she transferred to the University of Vermont and figured out how to merge her love of environmental studies and Latin America with her love for the outdoors and hiking, skiing, camping and snowboarding.
Six weeks after arriving in Burlington, she disappeared. After her body was found Friday off a rural road near the university, friends and family who knew her growing up in Arlington struggled to make sense of their loss. They knew the 21-year-old as more than a missing young woman whose face had been plastered for the past week on television screens and newspapers across the country.
"She had just come into her own, knowing what she wanted to do," Yasmine Rassam, her older half sister, said yesterday. "She was just really, really happy."
Burlington police disclosed few developments in the case yesterday, as an autopsy report was pending. Police were questioning Brian Rooney, 36, a construction worker who is in custody on unrelated sexual assault charges. He was observed on a video camera, police said, walking with Gardner-Quinn before she disappeared Oct. 7.
Gardner-Quinn, a senior at the university, was last seen in the early hours that Saturday walking back to the dormitories after celebrating a friend's birthday. Police believe she borrowed Rooney's cellphone to call friends because the battery in hers had died. She was not seen alive again. Those details of her case are known.
Friends said the world should know more. That she played the cello. That she loved nature, photography and travel. That she spent hour upon hour last summer sitting in a swamp in Brazil to survey giant otters. That she was never happier.
Gardner-Quinn, they said, was good enough to play select soccer. She swam on a team, worked as a lifeguard at the neighborhood pool for years, and was known for her jokes and crazy antics. She sang in her church and high school choirs, her clear, earthy alto a thing of beauty.
Her life, people said, made a difference.
Ian Willson, 22, was in a rut a few years ago. He said he would not now be in college without her push. "To me, she was one of the most inspirational people I've ever met," he said. She was independent, funny and "eccentric in an awesome way," he said. "She made friends wherever she went. Easily."
Gardner-Quinn's family remained in Burlington yesterday, awaiting autopsy results. Her parents had been waiting to meet her for dinner on a parents' weekend that Saturday and reported her missing when she did not show up. They had spent the next week hoping that their daughter would be found alive.
Rassam, 39, a lawyer and human rights activist, said remembering Gardner-Quinn's life helped keep crushing grief at bay.
"My sister was just a joy to everyone she was around, that she touched," Rassam said.
She grew up in a beautiful, wooded area of North Arlington. Her favorite place to go as a child was the woods near her home. Those woods and the family's garden instilled in her a love of nature. As she grew older, Rassam and friends said, that love became a passion, particularly as she learned about global climate change, rain forest depletion and other threats to the natural world.
Rassam said she remembers coming back from the Peace Corps and sharing stories and photographs with the young Gardner-Quinn. From then on, Gardner-Quinn wanted to travel, too.
On her MySpace account on the Web, which she last checked the morning before she disappeared, Gardner-Quinn's motto was "squares are unhealthy." Her favorite things, she wrote, were "green things. clouds and stars. music. life. learning and relearning. exploring." She described herself this way: "Can I travel with you?"
Already, she'd traveled to Europe with her parents and visited Rassam when she was studying in Cambridge, England. In her college years, she also spent a semester in Costa Rica, living with a poor family and studying and writing about the environment and poverty. She'd spent an intensive three weeks in South Africa and another semester in Brazil.
She was driven, friends said, followed her own inner compass and was incredibly bright. She met Willson, whom she later dated, at a summer camp for gifted children. In Arlington, she thrived at H-B Woodlawn Secondary Program, a school where students choose their own classes and guidance counselors and call teachers and the principal by their first names.
Gardner-Quinn set her MySpace account to the music of an alternative group called "13 & God." On her page, the group sings about a vision of a girl as a ghost, blowing up globes and setting them on clouds. "Without an atmosphere there is no chance at life and with no chance at life . . . I don't exist."
"Even though she's gone, we feel like she's with us," Rassam said. "She's always going to be with us."