For local residents and members of the IU community, developments surrounding the Lauren Spierer case last weekend led to heightened hopes but more questions.
Last Thursday, the FBI and Bloomington Police Department searched a home in Martinsville, Indiana, in connection to the case, BPD said. A second home was searched in Trafalgar, Indiana. The connection between these residences and the Spierer case remains unclear.
A family friend of the Spierers’ said the parents declined to give a statement about the investigation into their daughter’s disappearance.
Despite lingering questions, some members of the Bloomington community involved in the search took the news as a sign of progress. Shelly Leonard, a Gosport, Indiana, resident, is one of the administrators of a support page on Facebook called Voices for Lauren Spierer, which has 670 members.
She and other community members post messages counting the days since Spierer went missing and asking for thoughts and prayers for the Spierer family.
Today is the 1707th day since Spierer disappeared, according to the group’s account.
Leonard said she was surprised to hear the news about Thursday’s investigation. For the last few years, much of the discussion regarding the search for Spierer surrounded the actions of her friends on the night she went missing, Leonard said.
“It’s a direction people didn’t think they were going to go in,” Leonard said. “It just raises a whole new series of questions.”
At the same time, Leonard said it was reassuring to see BPD continue its efforts to find answers.
“The police have been so tight-lipped about this whole thing,” Leonard said. “Despite the silence, they are working on this.”
Leonard never met Spierer, but when she saw the memo the day after she went missing, she said she was drawn to the cause. She has a daughter a few years younger than Spierer. She could see many of her daughter’s characteristics in Lauren.
She volunteered in some of the initial searches for Spierer, where she met Spierer’s parents. She remembers Charlene Spierer saying she was worried people would forget about her daughter. Charlene didn’t want her daughter to disappear a second time, Leonard said.
Through the Facebook group, Leonard said she hopes the Spierers know the local community continues to be connected to the case.
“We’ve been here pretty much the whole time,” Leonard said.
Rabbi Sue Laikin Silberberg, executive director of the Helene G. Simon Hillel Center, was an early leader in organizing volunteer searches for Spierer and was often seen at the side of Lauren’s parents during the initial days after her disappearance.
“I think the family desperately needs resolution,” Silberberg said. “This has been hard for everyone, especially them. I hope for the family’s sake that they get some closure.”
IU junior Leyla Rashid is a Bloomington native and was on campus that summer for a piano academy as a high school student shortly after Spierer went missing.
“They instituted this buddy system where we had to have two other people with us at all times no matter where we went, all because of what happened to Lauren,” Rashid said.
As a leader for New Student Orientation during the summer, Rashid said she always receives questions from parents asking, “How could this happen?”
Rashid said she felt the news about the investigation left just as many questions unanswered.
“It would be nice if we could tie up loose ends, but that’s not what this is, or at least not yet,” she said.
Across the country, in Washington state a retired law enforcement officer named Dan Hally has been actively following the Spierer case.
He came across her case while working on similar cases within his department and was drawn to the family’s dedicated efforts to find her, he said.
He ended up speaking with her parents and volunteered to help search for any relevant information.
Hally said he ended up providing BPD with information pertaining to the case, but he is not sure if or how it was used.
Since December 2015, he has been blogging about her case and missing persons cases in general, hoping to encourage people to come forward to the police with any information they might have.
In response to the possible developments from Thursday, Hally said there was not enough information available to really make any judgments, but he said he is glad to see BPD continues to actively work on the case.
“We’re all really waiting to see how it pans out,” Hally said. “Whether it leads somewhere or not, it’s just too early to tell.”
