First, apologies if I mess up this post, I'm new here.
I suppose it's pretty pointless to be posting about this now, but Graham's walk to the downtown mall has bothered me for a while and I just had an idea about what might have happened, so I'm going to go ahead and post anyway.
I went to UVa years ago and lived and worked on the mall for three years--in fact, right on Water Street just a block or so away from where Tempo now is. I must have walked between the school and the mall--down Main Street--a couple hundred times. It seems nearly impossible to me that she would have deliberately walked to the mall via Preston Ave, that's an incredibly roundabout route. But at the same time, I find it equally impossible to imagine any UVa student wandering lost all the way down to the mall area from the university area, even if heavily inebriated. If you were that lost, even drunk you'd phone friends, phone a cab service, you'd stop and ask someone at McGrady's...not just keep on and on walking. Her trip ending at the mall seems too much of a coincidence to be entirely accidental.
It finally occurred to me that she may have been using her phone GPS and input the street number wrong. When she left the last party, she could have gotten turned around and headed up 14th Street in the wrong direction and ended up wandering about for a bit. If she was unable to raise friends with a text message (loud music at parties), she could have decided to use her phone's GPS and tried to input 14th and Main, the central intersection right near both the parties and her apartment. All it would take would be one little mistake--4th and Main rather than 14th and Main--and if she was close to Grady Avenue at the time, the GPS would have taken her straight down Grady onto Preston and then up to the downtown mall, where the intersection of 4th and Main is.
If you see her after she leaves McGrady's in the video posted above, she stops momentarily, and I wonder if she's checking her phone then. Same thing when she's reaching into her back pocket in the mall video. I suppose it's possible she was placing her trust in the phone's GPS rather than acknowledging that something just wasn't right.
As I say, I suppose this really doesn't matter. Feel terrible for her family.