Find Josh

I’m writing today’s thought as most of the population of the campus and the local police force scour the woods surrounding the campus of SJU. Police cars are all over, news teams are reporting, helicopters are flying over head, people are wandering the woods, and groups of 4-wheelers are checking out the trails in the woods. Why? It seems that a SJU junior went missing Saturday night. He was reported missing Sunday evening and a large, organized search is now underway to find Josh, the missing student. This is an interesting and scary event in this area for many reasons.

As most Minnesotans know, about a decade (or more, I’m not sure) ago Jacob Wetterling was kidnapped right here in St. Joseph. There were many accusations thrown around back then and some of them are starting to resurface now. There is a difference with this disappearance, however, in that Josh simply didn’t come home after Saturday night. He was last seen leaving a party from Metten Court on the lower campus of SJU. His whereabouts from there are unknown and the circumstances that came to lead to his missing are also unknown. They have divers in the lake that is next to Metten Court to see if he possibly fell into the lake and drown. It’s so weird seeing all of the police all over our campus. It makes it seem like we’re in some type of murder mystery movie or something.

I first heard about this Sunday night via an email that the entire campus received and by this Monday morning our campus was covered with missing posters and student lead searches were going on before the law actually came to get involved. Many people are even not going to classes in order to help find him. It’s still weird hearing helicopters fly by every now and then.

There have also been rumors surfacing about the monastery also, but I think most of these are very unfounded and are only being brought up because of the rash of abuse cases reported in the Catholic Church over the last six months or so and the putting on probation of 14 monks. I think any monk would have quite a hard time sequestering someone and kidnapping and/or killing someone here on campus without someone in the order knowing or without being very suspicious.

I was talking about the whole situation with Hank yesterday and he thought it would be interesting if it turned out that Josh just picked up and left to visit a friend on a whim or something like that. I don’t really know why he was reported missing so soon because if my roommate didn’t come home from a party one night, then I would be reporting missing person alerts pretty often. I don’t know all the details of the situation, however, so I shouldn’t really be making any judgments. Let’s just hope that he’s found soon and that this is all cleared up. The last thing I really want right now is a controversial situation like this to be propagated here on our campus.