poor girl.
http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/197124p-170223c.html
Mystery turned to tragedy yesterday when volunteer searchers combing an upper Manhattan park found the naked body of a woman believed to be a missing Juilliard student.
Cops are investigating the death as a homicide, said several police sources, with positive identification expected as soon as today.
Pixieish aspiring actress Sarah Fox, 21, had disappeared after she left her apartment in running tights and a T-shirt about 5 p.m. on May 19 to jog through nearby Inwood Hill Park.
"Your gut drops. I just didn't want to find this thing," said John Higgins, a next-door neighbor of Fox's and one of the searchers who found the body lodged in mud amid woods and thorny bushes on the northern edge of the park.
"No one would go in there, at least not of their own volition," Higgins said.
The body matches Fox's description, including a tribal tattoo on her lower back, a police source said.
Ten volunteers walking through the park around 1 p.m. spotted the body on a damp patch of ground, 200 feet south of a toll plaza, between the Henry Hudson Parkway and some Amtrak railroad tracks.
Worried classmates first went looking for Fox, a South Jersey native and third-year drama student at the prestigious performing arts school, at the park early Thursday.
They handed out pictures and flyers with Fox's description to anyone who would take them.
They reported Fox missing Friday, and cops launched a search Saturday with helicopters and bloodhounds but came up empty.
Relatives and friends went back to the park Sunday, distributed flyers and offered a $10,000 reward for information on Fox's disappearance.
Cops and two busloads of Fox's relatives and friends were canvassing the park yesterday when the body was found.
After the grim discovery, the volunteers emerged from the woods and gathered at a baseball field off Dyckman St., crying and comforting one another.
"There's still hope," said Sarah Wilson, a close friend of Fox's who participated in the search. "[The body] is still unidentified."
The mud and recent heat accelerated the body's decomposition, a police source said. However, cops are all but convinced that the body is Fox's and suspect foul play, several sources said. They were checking surveillance cameras in the area and using a police dog to search for evidence.
A positive identification and cause of death will not be available until the medical examiner performs an autopsy today.
The 5-foot-2, 110-pound Fox grew up in Pennsauken, N.J., and moved to New York after she enrolled at Juilliard.
