local bar, for one last blowout before hunkering down to study. they closed the bar, went to ashley s boyfriends place. lauren s ex, joe, was his roommate. eventually, we just all kind of decided we are going to go to sleep now. right. i will remind you, there was alcohol involved. surprise, surprise. right! lauren stayed the night in joe s room. the next day, everybody was moving a bit slowly. i did not see lauren that morning. i also did not see joe that morning. we just assumed they were in the room together. it was then time to buckle down. all of the friends, joe included, went off to cram. you just kind of go into this hole, and you study constantly, you have no contact with anybody. so it took a few days to realize that nobody had heard from lauren. no reason yet to assume
lauren s called david. he said he hadn t talked to her in days. i remember specifically him hanging up and calling back a few minutes later saying, what s going on? back at the apartment, ashley rounded up lauren s law school friends. including that ex-boyfriend joe. with whom she d spent the night last time any of the friends saw her. joe immediately went to the law school to search the law school for her. while the other friends took a careful look around the apartment. they found some food wrappers and in her car, a receipt from a restaurant drive-through, time stamped saturday, 6:00 pm. the evening after that pre-study party. but now it was wednesday night. the restaurant was at that 4 days old. so, where did she go? for a run? did she have some sort of accident? or was it something even worse?
i m going to get you. but no response. was she studying too hard to look at a few photos? katie tried again the next day. and the day after that. and again, no response. that s not normal for her. we would talk a lot. katie called lauren s cell phone. and her phone was off. and i immediately was like, this isn t right. so i called her sister caitlin and i said, lawrence phone is off. she hasn t been answering me for days. have you heard from her? no, she had not. so caitlin reached out to lauren s law school friend ashley. her sister contacted me over a message on facebook. hey, trying to get into touch with lauren. have you seen her? can you let her know we re trying to get in touch with her. we haven t heard from her. this was wednesday. now thinking back, actually hadn t seen lauren since that pre-study party friday night.