ISU student still missing

AMES, Iowa — The case of a missing Iowa State University student has passed a milestone.

On Feb. 21, Jon Lacina, 21, had been missing for 30 days, a point in Iowa cases after which the likelihood of a missing person being found drops significantly.

In 2009, 87 percent of Iowa’s more than 5,000 missing person cases were cleared within 30 days. Seven percent were cleared within 180 days, and one percent took six months to a year to resolve. The rest went unsolved. Most of these were juvenile cases.

Meanwhile, interest in Lacina’s case has waned. Police say there’s no new information to release.

All that’s known about Lacina’s disappearance is that he was last seen on Jan. 22 leaving a party and was reported missing eight days later. There was alcohol at the party, but no one knows whether Lacina was drunk. He said he was going home, but no one saw him leave. Just before 11 p.m., someone made a two-second incomplete phone call from his cell phone.

Wednesday morning, members of the Ames Fire and Police Departments, the Story County Sheriff’s Office and ISU’s Department of Public Safety used underwater cameras to look under the 18-inch thick ice in the southeast corner of Lake LaVerne.

The location and its history were not lost on investigators. This was the corner of the lake where ISU student Abel Bolanos’ body was found after he was missing for three days in 2007.

The searchers saw nothing, but they said the lake may be searched again.

There are many more areas to search — areas where snow and ice cover could make it impossible to spot a body.

Investigative efforts have failed to turn up any indications of foul play or reasons why Lacina might choose to vanish.

“There’s nothing there,” Sgt. Howard Snyder of the Ames Police Department said. “For all intents and purposes, he seemed like a perfectly normal kid, no dark secrets or anything like that.”

Lacina’s disappearance has been linked with the “Smiley Face Killer” conspiracy theory, which first touched Ames with Bolanos’ death.

Under this theory, a person or group of people kill college-aged men who are out drinking and make the deaths look like tragic drownings. Proponents say the killings are marked by a graffiti “smiley face” found nearby.

However, police have typically pointed to a lack of evidence binding the deaths together, saying the deaths were more likely the result of alcohol consumption. Investigators confirmed that alcohol played a factor in Bolanos’ death.

In April 2008, after being given the case files of two retired New York Police Department detectives who championed the theory on several national news broadcasts, the FBI issued a release saying there was no evidence to substantiate the claim.

The two detectives were in Ames after Bolanos’ body was recovered and spent time looking around the steam tunnels near Lake LaVerne.

Lacina’s disappearance was linked to the serial killer theory within days on the Internet, and would-be detectives have connected it with two other cases that occurred in Minnesota and Wisconsin in the span of a few days.

Snyder and Jerry Stewart, director of the ISU Department of Public Safety, both said they had been contacted by people offering this as an explanation for Lacina’s disapperance.

Snyder said he had read about the theory online.

“Jon Lacina aside, all these people turned up having drowned, but there’s no sign of physical force. There’s no sign of sexual assault. There’s nothing in the toxicology reports on a lot of them,” he said. “The connection is just the fact that they all seem to have drowned, and they’d all been drinking.

“If you look at a lot of those cases, there’s a few in there that could be classified as possible abductions. But a lot of them, they’re in that high-risk age group, 18 to 25, they’ve been drinking, and they were around water.”

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