College of General Studies freshman Sara Vasquez returned to her Warren Towers residence unharmed this morning after she was missing for nearly 30 hours, according to her friends.
“[Vasquez is] completely safe. Everything was completely fine,” said CGS freshman Rissa Freedman.
Vasquez returned to Warren at around 8 a.m., Freedman said.
Vasquez, 19, had been missing after visiting Mantra, a nightclub and lounge, and was last seen with an unidentified white male between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m. Sunday, according to friends who went out with her.
Vasquez said she did not leave the nightclub with any of the men who had been around her at the nightclub, and she said she spent the night with a friend.
“I feel bad because of my irresponsible behavior,” Vasquez said. “A lot of people were in a panic because I couldn’t call people. Because of my actions, people had to worry, and I feel horrible.”
She had visited the club with about 10 friends from Warren, said College of Arts and Sciences freshman Brian Koehler.
When Vasquez, of Kansas City, Mo., did not return to her room yesterday morning, her friends called the Boston University Police Department and notified Warren Towers security.
After making phone calls to people who attended or were near Mantra last night, the friends compiled a description of the man who was supposedly last seen with Vasquez, said School of Management freshman Kathryn Saloom.
Saloom described the man as white, “maybe Italian-looking” with dark hair, dark eyes and wearing a diamond earring in each ear. She said he is between 5-feet-7-inches and 5-feet-10-inches tall and weighs about 200 pounds, according to the reports compiled by friends.
“I called somebody that I had recognized hanging around her, and he said, ‘She told me she was leaving with her boyfriend,'” Saloom said.
Vasquez does not have a boyfriend, said Saloom, who said the man Vasquez left with was last seen with her between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m.
Koehler said he received a text message from Vasquez’s phone at “exactly 3 a.m.” that read, “I’m home and fine.” Koehler said he was suspicious of the message because “everything [was] spelled correctly, with a period at the end,” and “she was way too drunk to type by herself, and she wouldn’t type like that anyways. She wouldn’t put an apostrophe.”
Koehler said the text message was also unusual because he was not her closest friend. He said he had not contacted Vasquez at all that night to check on her, so “there wasn’t a reason for her to send it to me.”
“We don’t actually believe it was [Vasquez], but [the text was] from her phone,” Saloom said.
However, Vasquez said her SideKick automatically punctuated her text message the night before, accounting for the “uncharacteristic” text.
Putting together the events leading up to Vasquez’s alleged disappearance, Koehler said the group spent the night “mingling around the club” and shuffling between the dance floor and a table. At some point during the night, “guys that weren’t a part of our group came over and [started] hitting on the girls,” he said.
The men began “taking advantage of [Vasquez],” Koehler said. “They were making out with her, taking pictures of her while they were making out with her, and she wasn’t in the state of mind to know what exactly was going on.”
Friends told Vasquez to stop, but Koehler said she “didn’t really understand the situation.”
While the group of friends moved between the table and the dance floor, no one noticed when Vasquez left with the unidentified white man, Koehler said.
“We got to the end of the night, and we didn’t leave as one group, which was a mistake,” he said.
“People left in small groups,” Koehler continued. “It was me and [Saloom] at the end of the night, [and] we figured everyone had cleared out and gone home.”
The group of friends contacted BUPD around 6 p.m. last night, Saloom said, but they were told they could not file a missing person report with BUPD because none of the friends were related to Vasquez.
BUPD declined to comment last night.
Vasquez’s mother, who came to Boston from Providence, R.I., has contacted the Boston Police Department to file a missing person report, Saloom said. Vasquez’s mother declined to comment last night.
Vasquez’s roommate was away for the weekend and did not return until late in the afternoon yesterday, Vasquez’s friends said.
Vasquez said as she was walking toward Warren from the BU East T stop, her friend approached her and said, “Sara . . . I thought you were dead.” She said, “he looked like he’d seen a ghost.”