The father of a 21-year-old Arlington native who vanished early Saturday in downtown Burlington, Vt., begged the public Tuesday for any information that would help investigators locate his daughter.
“On behalf of our family, we desperately are looking for our daughter,” John-Charles Quinn said, during a video broadcast made Tuesday morning in Vermont. “We remain hopeful that we will find her and that she will be returned to us safe and sound and we pray that that will be today.”
Michelle Gardner-Quinn, a senior at the University of Vermont, was last heard from at about 2:15 a.m. Saturday as she stopped to borrow a man’s cell phone along a well-known hilly route linking the hilltop campus with the downtown. The chief of the Burlington Police Department called her disappearance “highly suspicious.”
“This goes against everything that all of her friends and family know about her,” Police Chief Thomas Tremblay said. “We believe that she headed up the hill but where she went from there, it’s unclear.”
Gardner-Quinn was reported missing during the weekend by her parents, who were visiting Burlington as part of the university’s parents weekend. According to police, she had spent part of Friday night with friends at downtown bars before heading off on her own. At about 2:15 a.m., Gardner-Quinn borrowed a man’s cell phone to make a call that became the last known contact she had before disappearing.
FBI agents and the Vermont National Guard joined the Burlington Police Department and university police in the search Tuesday. Gardner-Quinn’s friends created a Web site to seek help finding the young woman.
Kevin Lloyd, creator of the site at Facebook.com, said he met Gardner-Quinn this summer when the two were interns counting mayflies and monitoring streams at Virginia’s Prince William Forest Park.
“What was so great about our relationship and about her — she can be friends with about anybody,” Lloyd said Tuesday by phone from Raleigh, N.C., where he attends North Carolina State University. “She’s one of the best people that I’ve ever known that’s good at loving somebody when they first meet ‘em.”
Lloyd said he had last talked to Gardner-Quinn about a month ago.
“She could look out over her balcony and see the mountains,” Lloyd said. “She was really enjoying being there and being in such a beautiful place.”
Gardner-Quinn is the fourth young woman to go missing in northern Vermont and New Hampshire in less than three years.
Maura Murray, a 21-year-old University of Massachusetts nursing student, disappeared after she crashed her car in February 2004 in northern New Hampshire. Brianna Maitland, 17, was last seen in March 2004 at her dishwashing job at a restaurant near a northern Vermont ski area. Maitland’s car was found crashed into an abandoned house not far from her work.
In March 2005, Laura Winterbottom disappeared from Burlington’s downtown shopping district.
She was found dead in her car the next morning.
