Found Deceased VA - Morgan Dana Harrington, 20, Charlottesville, 17 Oct 2009 - #5

[beachy]

I'm not sure if anyone has brought this up, if so, I apologize. Even though we do not have many details about this case, I think it's important for us to be reasonable on the possible scenarios. Obviously the FBI is involved and i thought it was interesting because currently the FBI's top investigative priorities are (according to wikipedia):

1. Protect the United States from terrorist attack
2. Protect the United States against foreign intelligence operations and espionage ;
3. Protect the United States against cyber-based attacks and high-technology crimes ;
4. Combat public corruption at all levels;
5. Protect civil rights;
6. Combat transnational/national criminal organizations and enterprises ;
7. Combat major white-collar crime;
8. Combat significant violent crime;
9. Upgrade technology for successful performance of the FBI's mission.

So, I doubt this is a case of her just simply "running away". Am I wrong?

 

[Eclipse33]

Secret Agent Mom!!

I'm glad to hear that! I had posted flyers there also, but when I came back 2days later, they were gone. It's good to know that there are others out there that care!! Keep up the good work!!

 

[kant]

OK I just re read on the FindMorgan.com discussion board about a guy at Boyd's Tavern about 15miles(or minutes) away from JPJ arena encountering a frantic young man,lost, trying to get to Harrisonburg. Maybe MH planned to meet up with a guy that night(she didn't really care that much about seeing Metallica now but didn't tell her parents because they purchased the expensive tickets)So she speaks with this dude he's on his way- maybe 15 min. away- it's break time now after Lamb of God so MH decides to leave to meet up with him but he's LOST and doesn't show up.This could be the plan that tarheelplaya refers to. So when MH can't find the guy, and can/t get back in ..trouble finds her.

If this is true, it's interesting and plausible to me. Who's digging into this further? Thanks, newshound. WIsh we knew more about this (and a lot of thngs.)

 

[patriciah]

Hi all, I have been reading these threads for the last week or so now and finally signed up so I could post. I've been into going to rock concerts for most of my life, so this story really hit home for me. Last week, at the age of 34, I attended my first concert alone, and I couldn't help thinking of Morgan. I had a great time, but was somewhat intimidated by the sheer volume of the crowd in the concourse, being alone, and I can't imagine how she must have felt being alone. One thing I wondered is if it is possible that she took the battery out of her phone. I did this when I got to the show last week, knowing that my phone continues to run - checking email etc - even when it is turned off. I did this to conserve the battery until the end of the show, in case I had any issues getting out of there. Just a thought. It's been really interesting reading all of your posts the last few days.

 

[secret_agent_mom]

I'm not sure if anyone has brought this up, if so, I apologize. Even though we do not have many details about this case, I think it's important for us to be reasonable on the possible scenarios. Obviously the FBI is involved and i thought it was interesting because currently the FBI's top investigative priorities are (according to wikipedia):

1. Protect the United States from terrorist attack
2. Protect the United States against foreign intelligence operations and espionage ;
3. Protect the United States against cyber-based attacks and high-technology crimes ;
4. Combat public corruption at all levels;
5. Protect civil rights;
6. Combat transnational/national criminal organizations and enterprises ;
7. Combat major white-collar crime;
8. Combat significant violent crime;
9. Upgrade technology for successful performance of the FBI's mission.

So, I doubt this is a case of her just simply "running away". Am I wrong?

I don't think you are wrong at all. I think LE knows it isn't just "running away".

I thought that the FBI got involved in cases to offer local LE more/better resources - like for testing evidence, etc. And that they had to be involved if there was a chance that the person could have been taken across state lines because then it becomes a federal crime and not just a state crime.

 

[Le Singe]

So, I doubt this is a case of her just simply "running away". Am I wrong?

I think the thing is they don't know if she just simply ran away. Based on the way they are acting I don't think they have any evidence pointing to her running away. In cases where there is evidence someone just ran away you can usually tell by the way LE is acting that something is up (my opinion). I also think a person who is alive and living freely (i.e. not being held captive) tends to leave traces that they are out there, and its hard to plan to leave without leaving any evidence of this. I therefore think that b/c there is no evidence (as far as we know) point to the fact that she might have just left then I think they feel it is more likely she did not (compared to if there was some evidence that she might have run away) they must proceed as if she did not run away, hence the involvement of the FBI. I think this is what you were saying so yes I agree. However I think it's important to acknowledge that just b/c they are acting as if she did not just run away it does not mean that this possiblity can be totally ruled out.

 

[Chili Fries]

I touched on this in another thread...I hope LE has looked into the callback time for the local stagehands. They probably would have been expected to show up an hour or so before the end of the concert to tear down the stage and lighting and load everything back into the trucks. It would be interesting to know if any stagehands didn't show up to work that night or showed up late.

 

[beachy]

I think the thing is they don't know if she just simply ran away. Based on the way they are acting I don't think they have any evidence pointing to her running away. In cases where there is evidence someone just ran away you can usually tell by the way LE is acting that something is up (my opinion). I also think a person who is alive and living freely (i.e. not being held captive) tends to leave traces that they are out there, and its hard to plan to leave without leaving any evidence of this. I therefore think that b/c there is no evidence (as far as we know) point to the fact that she might have just left then I think they feel it is more likely she did not (compared to if there was some evidence that she might have run away) they must proceed as if she did not run away, hence the involvement of the FBI. I think this is what you were saying so yes I agree. However I think it's important to acknowledge that just b/c they are acting as if she did not just run away it does not mean that this possiblity can be totally ruled out.

So true. That's why I think it's crazy for people to still think that her running away is in fact what happened; the only logical reason. So much doesn't add up, but I am on the side of LE to release or not release whatever is necessary to find Morgan.

I also find it ironic that people are so quick to bash LE and view the handling the case as inadequate, but yet calls LE first when something goes wrong.

 

[Cardinal47]

So here we are on day 17. I have to ask myself and others "what do we know now that we didn't know back at day 1". I am sorry folks but my answer is "not much". Lots of speculation but thats about it.

I am curious about how the handling of the cases that the local and State of VA is viewed by the residents. Are they known for being thorough? How have the victims of other crimes been treated, found, recovered?

Anybody out there had dealings with these agencys and what was your experience?

 

[Le Singe]

Le singe I really don't see how you got all of that out of

i get C6's statement to mean:
as long as LE knows the best way (and they do that every time) to maximize the likelihood of live recovery, then you can expect (something) when the chances of live recovery of this subgroup involved is hi/reasonable/possible (yes, C6's statement can be interpreted to also imply that a 0 chance of recovery cannot be maximized) so i dont see how C6 was wrong. i get the impression you both are saying the same thing...but you just wanted to say .
alternatively i got : C6 says X+y: you say X, maybe. but wrong on Y, and then go onto basically say Y from another angle.

lol

Assuming LE both knows best how to effect a rapid, live recovery of a missing person and that they always perform up to reasonable expectation is warranted only when the live recovery rate of index subgroups is high, which it is not for suspiciously missing, attractive 20 YOA females.

I interpreted this, possibly incorrectly, to say:

If they know the best way to effect live recovery and if they apply what they know well then ---> there will be a high recovery rate ----> there is not a high recovery rate therefore ----> they must either not know the best way or they are not applying the best way well.

My point was that there are a lot of factors that contribute to the live recovery rate beyond just the quality of method they use and the quality of how the method is applied. So I think it is possible that they could be applying the best method and applying it efficiently and still not get a high rate of recovery. It may be the case that it is not possible to achieve a high rate of recovery no matter what you do. I also was saying that just b/c the recovery rate of one subgroup is higher than another it may not have anything to do with what LE does it may just be the nature of the beast so to speak.

I do 100% agree that the better the investigation the better the results will be but I think good investigation only goes so far and its possible that given the nature of this type of investigation it may be that you can never expect a high rate of live recovery.

There may be some merit to comparing success rate for these types of cases between different agencies, but I think that is limited b/c these cases are infrequent enough and have so many individual circumstances that it is hard to compare.

Bigger picture I am saying it is unfair to judge the quality of the investigation based on whether Morgan is recovered quickly or not or maybe even not at all. There are lots of these type cases that are never solved or are not solver for years. I think this suggest that they are simply very hard to solve because unlike a puzzle or a card game when dealing with something like this out in the world there are an almost infinite number of possibilities as to what could have happened.

I hope this explains it better.

 

[evelyn24]

So I see there really isn't anything new.
It's not odd though. People disappear off the face of the earth everyday without a trace. Unfortunately MH might be one of those cases.
IF this was a stranger abduction without a witness, it's going to be hard to find MH. If she ran or was harmed by someone she knew then it will be a lot easier to find out what happened to her.

 

[mark00]

So here we are on day 17. I have to ask myself and others "what do we know now that we didn't know back at day 1". I am sorry folks but my answer is "not much". Lots of speculation but thats about it.

I am curious about how the handling of the cases that the local and State of VA is viewed by the residents. Are they known for being thorough? How have the victims of other crimes been treated, found, recovered?

Anybody out there had dealings with these agencys and what was your experience?

In my experience, they are very concerned with appearing to protect the civil rights of the accused. But in terms of developing evidence, they won't do it unless you bring it to them. Charlottesville is weird. It's in a very LE-proactive state. A couple of years ago, Virginia was second only to TX in the number of prisoners it executed. Charlottesville is itself a liberal enclave and seems much more tolerant of crime than VA in general.

I suspect the Harringtons know this and that's why they hired their own PR firm (now managing the discussion on FB and possibly here, too), put up their own tip board, and even why they left flowers at the police station the day they put them on the bridge. They are probably raising money because they realize that LE is not going to be proactive, and that they will probably have to conduct the investigation themselves.

In a case like this, I think we would all prefer LE to take the stance of a gang of snarling dogs. I wish they would pull out all the stops and turn this state upside down looking for MH. Sadly, I don't get this impression, do you?

 

[kellync]

I always watch the newer posters more carefully. many times they ARE the ones closest to the case and want to share info or have a different perspective on things, even though some are not as reliable as others. Tricia and the mods thoroughly check out anyone who claims to be a real insider, and even suspends their posting privileges until they are checked out. just like in the real world, there are people who are a little kooky everywhere, but all in all, this is the best forum with the most caring people and the most reliable info IMO.

 

[tarheellvr]

Whoa there. You do us "newbies" that are really concerned a real disservice in saying we are getting our jollys. I never like finger pointing but felt the fickle finger of fate on that one...ouch I say..."ouch".

I never meant to step on your toes Honey....I only meant a certain few of the newbies. I've thought your posts warranted merit and will gladly tell you so.

I should have worded my post better.....and me being critical of the other Tarheel's skills. A big OUCH for me :banghead: so sorry Honey, really!

 

[Le Singe]

i agree with you on one hand, Cindy, on the other its like this: yes, you only have so many trained people, but when you know that in the beginning you will have a huge volume and require a lot of personnel you should have that in place--that's logistics. it's like if you have an earthquake and are expecting a lot of injuries to flood the ER and need a lot of ambulances and medical equipment--in general you (the municipality) might not have such on hand to accomodate this kind of dilemma, but if you expect one eery so often, or its not that infrequent in your region or area of work, then you have to be ready to assemble. knowing you might have an extra 100 on payroll for three weeks, will need some tents to operate out of, etc....if you miss a single tip, that might be key, as we stated early in thread 1 or 2, that something very small can be the case breaker, and later LE posted a request for tips on anything out of the ordinary.

my saying the family should pay someone to do it (didnt really mean that the mom would be on the fone saying "oh, have you seen my Morgan?") is a way to stem the loss of tips from the lack of resources of the LE, as per the general appearance of the case's handling. it is true...if we can walk to the moon, but we can't find a person, it really is a matter of resources...not like you need helicopters flying around all day, but you need to get the tips at least. and if they are having trouble following up on tips, and are doing everything over the fone, without a voice analyzer, then you can bet some tips will be false, some maybe true, but will sound false to the human ear and they will discount them..

again, it gets messy when there arent enuff people to handle it: it's like getting slammed in a restaurant with 1000 customers all at once--if its ever happened before to your restaurant or your type of restaurant, then you should have an emergency action plan-unless you think 5 days is a reasonable amount of time to get water to people [FEMA]?

I understand your point that LE should make best use of the resources they have. But I think it is important to realize that there is only so much that good logistics’ can achieve. If they had 100 people on standby then what would those people do the majority of the time they were not needed?

I'm sure they have a phone bank set up to field calls the people they take the information and pass it to the investigators. The investigators then prioritizes these based on what they feel is the likely hood of them 'bearing fruit" and they then start contacting people back. I agree that it should be easy to bring on temps or even volunteers to man the phones. But I have not heard anyone complain about not being able to get thru to them. The complaints are they have not been contacted back or not contacted in a timely manner. In order to have people to contact them back requires two important things:
1. They have to be professionally trained in investigation and interviewing witnesses.
2. They have to be "plugged-in" to everything that is going on with the case and be up to date on all the aspects of this.

Then there has to be further people to collect and analyze all this information in the big picture. While initially having these 100 people on call that can step in seems like an obvious simply solution, when you really stop and look at it I don't think it reasonable thing to think that in most, if not all areas, there are 100 people who are qualified to do this that can jump in at the drop of a hat. That is simply is not the case. It’s not like with a disaster where you need to people to hand out water or serve food, things almost any volunteer can do. To follow up leads they need trained professionals.

Beyond that if you assumed (in my opinion unrealistically) that these people where available it quickly becomes an issue of trying to manger something of this nature with people that have never worked together before. After a certain number of investigators additional people start to provide diminishing returns until the point where beyond a certain number of people there is no benefit to having more people.

And lastly you could say well we will make up the 100 by pulling in all the detectives from various agencies in the state. Well all those detective have cases, missing persons, murder investigations they are working on where they are. How can they just leave what they are doing? That would mean you are saying that Morgan is somehow more important than the many other people at any moment that are victims of violent crime and that’s not right. In going to the moon there is only one moon and you are only trying to go there a finite number of times. What needs to be understood is across this country there are hundreds of people (if not more) that go missing every day and there are thousands (if not more) people that are murdered very day we cannot stop everything to solve these cases and we can't stop everything just to solve any one of them.

In the world resources are always limited period no matter what b/c anyone who is doing one thing can't be doing something else. I hate what happened to Morgan and I too want it resolved yesterday, but no matter how we feel about it life on planet earth can't come to a screeching halt while we all look for her I wish it could but it can't. How could we look at one family and say we have to temporarily stop looking for your missing family member so the detectives can go look for this other person....we can't...or at least we shouldn't. There is only so much resource's that can be applied to this and we can all not like it, but we have to accept it.

If you want to talk about specifics that they are not doing right that’s fine I’m sure there are many. But I don’t think we can say that there doing it wrong all they have to do is X when doing X is not realistic.

 

[Le Singe]

they have inordinate resources, so such excuses [we're short on manpower] shouldnt make much sense at this point.

What are you basing this on? I think you would have a hard time backing this up with any sort of evidence. It of course varies from state to state, but I've heard news stories about more than one State police department having to limit the scope of their 'mission' due to funding. Virtually every state policy crime lab has huge back logs. The reality is this general just isn't the case. I mean you’re talking about logistics’ and ya the logistic are easy when you make assumptions like our resources are unlimited. In the real world logistics are very difficult (people who are good at them are very well paid) b/c you can't just assume our resources are unlimited because in real life they are limited and based on the our countries aversion to "big government" (not that this is a bad thing) virtually no government agencies are sitting around with inordinate resources.

I know you can say well they have a budget of XX millions of dollars, but that doesn't mean inordinate resources you have to compare it to everything they have to do. For example if I told you I had a maid service I ran and I had 100 maids that worked for me you might say I had inordinate resources, but then If I told you I was responsible for cleaning 5 million homes a week you might change your mind about my inordinate resources.

 

[theforgotten]

And lastly you could say well we will make up the 100 by pulling in all the detectives from various agencies in the state. Well all those detective have cases, missing persons, murder investigations they are working on where they are. How can they just leave what they are doing? That would mean you are saying that Morgan is somehow more important than the many other people at any moment that are victims of violent crime and that’s not right. In going to the moon there is only one moon and you are only trying to go there a finite number of times. What needs to be understood is across this country there are hundreds of people (if not more) that go missing every day and there are thousands (if not more) people that are murdered very day we cannot stop everything to solve these cases and we can't stop everything just to solve any one of them.

Thank you so much for pointing this out. Morgan is just like any other missing person, no better no worse. She should not get anymore attention or her parents shouldn't be treated better by the police then the next persons, just because she's female, white, and her parents have money. I really feel bad for the one's, who can't afford to hire special firms or Private investigaters, to get their message out. I'm not even going to get into the media side of this, because it upsets me so.:twocents:

 

[Le Singe]

Okay... so this is totally unrelated to what has been said thus far...BUT- Why are we not hearing from the FBI? They joined the case shortly after Morgan went missing AND BEFORE it became a criminal investigation. Why are all the reporting and pressers coming from the State Police? I am not insinuating the SP aren't doing a great job...just wondering. It seems odd that the FBI wouldn't be releasing statements instead- but maybe that's just me.

On another note, I ate in Front Royal, VA on Sunday afternoon and was very excited to see Find Morgan flyers at the restaurant. I also saw some this morning on my way in to work. Maybe this case is picking up!! I surely hope so! :woohoo:

It is my understanding that this is the way they prefer to handle it. I think in the past many local LE agencies did not like asking the FBI for help b/c they felt like they did a lot of the work and then the FBI would swoop in and pickup a lot of the glory. The FBI may have been intentionally doing this back in the J Edgar Hoover days as he was very politically astute and from what in know of him (this is admittedly limited) he was certainly not above this type of thing. Anywho based on some things I have read and the way the FBI often phrases things it is my speculation (speculation only so take it for what it’s worth) that the modern FBI is very conscious of this an tries its best to stay in the background so that local agencies are more likely to ask them to help.

Another thing is this is not a case were the FBI has clear jurisdiction. I think they are only involved because one of the other agencies asked them to help. In this case they would only offer technical assistance and resources so that would mean that it would be customary for VASP to take the lead since the FBI is only supporting them.

This is a good thing I guess, anything that gets people to work together is good. It also has certain benefits for the FBI as far as Public relations are concerned blah blah blah i could explain further but i feel as though my post of late are starting to resemble a dickens novels :woohoo: so I will spare you (a very piss and vinegary dickens novel lol....:snooty

 

[Le Singe]

double post....one thousand pardons

 

[VirginiaDoll]

I can't believe that they have NO new leads on this.

Yall have brought up some good points, about LE withholding information to quality assure the tips. I also think that a perp may "troll" these sites to gauge where the investigation is going.

IMO, she was grabbed in the parking lot or on the bridge. IMO, the perp may or may not have been headed to the concert and may or may not have been under the influence of something. The mountains and valley's are vast in this area, as are many private properties. Many, many people live on 10 + acres outside the city limits, so she could be on a private property where homes/barns etc. are not even in view of the road.

I would like LE to ask people to be aware of suspicious activity surrounding Charlottesville, in Free Union, Buck Mountain etc. If you head towards the Homestead, the country is beautiful but with spread out development, so it would be easy to hide someone. But, these little areas are pretty close knot, so if she were out in the country, someone may have noticed something!
This is JMO only.

Did anyone see a car or truck parked in a wooded/country area at an odd hour?