One of Our Own has Gone Missing

Very sad. She was a Rooer and evidently was at the farm this year or last...

Bonnaroo mentioned in story

www.roanoke.com/news/roanoke/wb/223391

Morgan Harrington's parents continue clinging to hope as they search for their missing daughter
Morgan Harrington's parents try to keep her case moving forward.

By Rex Bowman | The Roanoke Times
Gil Harrington stands in her daughter's bedroom in their Roanoke County home. Morgan Harrington went missing Saturday in Charlottesville.

KYLE GREEN The Roanoke Times


She is known nationwide as the beautiful young blonde in the black miniskirt who vanished from a Metallica concert in Charlottesville over the weekend, but to her friends and family, Morgan Harrington is the kind woman who volunteered her summers to work with children from violent homes, letting little girls play with her golden tresses.

She is the young woman who enjoyed the "Twilight" novels, the movie "Harriet the Spy" the television show "Real Housewives of Orange County" and the music of Jerry Garcia.

And she is the quirky young woman whose list of what to bring to a recent Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival included a full-length mirror and a hula hoop.

"She loves putting on her makeup and looking good," said her mother, Gil Harrington of Roanoke County. "But she's the kind of girl who's also happy sleeping in a tent for a week. Usually 'makeup girls' aren't like that."

Gil Harrington, a nurse, and her husband, Dan, Carilion Clinic's vice president for academic affairs, have been offering reporters sundry tidbits about their missing daughter's life for days now, steeling themselves for interviews as they seek to keep Morgan's name and picture at the forefront of public consciousness.

It has been, admittedly, a harrowing process, one they have endured even as they struggle to help investigators working to find their daughter. "Having to find DNA samples and dental records of your child -- it's not a path or ground you thought you'd have to walk," Gil Harrington said Tuesday in her home on Strathmore Lane. "There's no template for it."

Harrington, a 20-year-old Virginia Tech education major, disappeared Saturday night after leaving the John Paul Jones Arena at the University of Virginia. She had gone there with friends, but between 8:30 and 9:30 p.m. she called them to say she was outside and couldn't get back in, and that she would either find them after the show or find another way home. The next day, a passerby found her purse and cellphone in a small parking area between the arena and an athletic field. The cellphone's battery was gone.

Harrington, 5-foot-6 and 120 pounds, was wearing a black T-shirt with the name of metal band Pantera in tan letters across the front, a black miniskirt, black tights and black knee-high boots.

Virginia State Police, in a news conference in Charlottesville on Wednesday, said they have received 100 calls from around the country and are following up on all of them. State police have set up a new tip line, (434) 352-3467, and also plan to announce a Crimestoppers reward of at least $50,000 as early as today. Police also noted that they have searched a large area around the arena three times, using search dogs and a SWAT team that was in the city for training. Otherwise, Lt. Joe Rader conceded, police have little new to say about the criminal investigation.

"It's very disheartening, in all honesty, that this time has gone by and we haven't had any kind of contact or any leads that have worked out," Rader said.

In Roanoke County, meanwhile, the Harringtons -- who also have a 22-year-old son, Alex -- are sharing their daughter's life with the national and local media, fielding phone calls, traveling to studios and sitting for interviews. They have even shown reporters their daughter's bedroom, the decor of which exemplifies what her friends call her eclectic taste in everything: Her bedsheets feature drawings of little fairy princesses, and Tibetan prayer cloths adorn the wooden headboard. A collection of cobalt-blue bottles sits atop a curio cabinet in one corner. On the walls are posters of musical acts as diverse as Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, the Beatles and Bob Marley. A Beach Boys album cover is taped to the wall, as is a Barry Manilow single. A full laundry basket sits on a chest and her open suitcase sits on the floor at the foot of her bed.

Before the concert, Morgan Harrington tried on three different outfits for her mother to appraise; ultimately she chose the all-black ensemble. The purses she discarded were left in a pile in the room.

The Harringtons are certain their daughter is not a runaway. "We're very close," said Dan Harrington. "We talk every day."

"She does what she's supposed to do," Gil Harrington said. "I called her two weeks ago and told her to get her flu shots. She got it the next day."

The Harringtons have a key to their daughter's apartment, and they also have the password to her computer. ("What's there to hide?" Gil Harrington asked.) Morgan's father does her banking, and she had asked him to help her with her algebra when she returned from Charlottesville.

"She always spoke to her dad, every day, and she would never be without her cellphone," said John Reburn, owner of Roanoke Valley Printworks in downtown Roanoke, where Morgan Harrington worked her summer after high school. "I called her my L.A. girl -- super, super out-there friendly. She was a hard worker who still managed to look like a million bucks. She always looked incredible."

Chelsea Helm, who attended Northside High School with Harrington and attends Virginia Tech with her as well, said Harrington's well-known sense of fashion "is creative and a little glamorous."

But like Reburn and Harrington's parents, Helm said the young woman's intelligence is one of her most notable traits. "She reads more than the average person our age," said Helm, 21. "We go shopping in downtown Blacksburg, but she spent time studying."

From the time she was 12 until she graduated from Lord Botetourt High School in 2007, Harrington volunteered every summer with Forgotten Victims, a program for children from kindergarten to fifth grade who have witnessed violence in their homes.

Harrington often let the little girls in the program play with her long blond hair, said Diane Kelly, executive director of Mental Health America of Roanoke Valley, which runs the program.

"She just let the kids be kids, and if that meant playing with her hair, fine," Kelly said. "They did finger-painting with pudding, and she had more fun doing that than the kids did. But she could be a disciplinarian. She'd say, 'We don't behave that way.' "

While Harrington's parents work to remind the public that their daughter is missing, her friends are also staying busy.

Helm and others are organizing a vigil for 7 p.m. today at the football field at Northside, where Harrington attended school before transferring to Lord Botetourt.

And for now, the Harringtons cling to hope, doing what they can to improve their daughter's chances of coming back to them.

"We're going through a slew of 'last times' now," Gil Harrington said. "You know, 'the last time this was touched, she touched it.' I am so afraid we're going to have a slew of firsts, 'first time without her on the holidays...' "

Staff writers Michael Sluss and Shawna Morrison contributed to this story.