Their coach said he saw few signs that the teens had hatched a secret bid for possible asylum in the U.S. or Canada. They appeared nervous, but he chalked that up to the competition and their new surroundings.
“Before, I thought they were acting a bit strangely, I thought maybe it was their first time to be there, to see the big buildings that we don’t have here.”
Before closing ceremonies, their coach saw the teens onto the floor of the auditorium once more. They carried tiny flags and joined the throng of other competitors whistling and whooping, the ecstatic close to an exhilarating three-day competition. From the highest seats, the coach said, it was impossible to see the teens. He said he planned to decompress with the team over pizza and coke after the competition, a reward for the hard work that earned them a 73rd place finish out of about 160 teams.
Police said this is when at least some of the team members slipped away, taking advantage of the noise and the chaos surrounding the competition’s end to disappear. At least one team member, Aristide, stayed behind. He helped their coach load the team’s robot onto a school bus that would take them back to their dorms at Trinity University. Then, Aristide carried the robot to the coach's room and told the coach that he was going to take a shower.
As Bindaba [the coach] unloaded his bag, he noticed something peculiar: the other five team members had apparently secreted their name tags and room keys in to Bindaba’s bag. For the coach, it was a deeply unsettling discovery. “I knew something nasty was happening,” Bindaba said. “I felt it from within.”
He then rushed to Aristide’s room: he was not there, and he had left behind a mess of pizza boxes and snacks. He checked the other rooms, too: the teens had still not returned. “I cannot really describe what I felt over there, but it was really scary for me,” Bindaba said.
Bindaba also began sending panicked messages to the teen’s parents back in Burundi. But their replies made Bindaba suspicious: one child’s uncle told the coach that perhaps the children were nearby; another’s mother told him to “cool down,” that perhaps the team was out having fun. “I am not seeing the kids,” Bindaba said. “How can I cool down?”
Just after midnight Wednesday, about 17 hours before the teens were set to depart from Dulles Airport, missing persons reports were filed. Their sober passport portraits went up on the D.C. police Twitter account, under the banner “MISSING PERSONS.”
Bindaba, who was unable to afford another plane ticket and had been assured the students were safe, headed home. The following morning, when Bindaba was still en route, police would announce two of the teens had made it to Canada.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...the-teens-disappeared/?utm_term=.5699f73df4ed