Details surrounding missing girl remain vague
By Katelynn McGinley
Signs posted around North Village the morning of Thursday, September 27 alerted the campus that a teenaged girl was missing and may possibly be on campus.
Rebecca Bainbridge, age 16, was reported missing from her Hagerstown, MD home on September 12. Deputy of Campus Safety Mike Webster told The McDaniel Free Press that the posters were put up as a favor to the Hagerstown Police Department, saying, “Sometimes people from Hagerstown will end up here…she [Bainbridge] doesn’t have any ties to the campus.”
When asked whether or not progress had been made on the case, Webster said he doubted it adding, “since we haven’t received a call telling us to take the signs down, I assume the case is still open.”
Carroll County sheriff’s department officers spotted on campus the night of Saturday, Septem-ber 29 were tight-lipped about their reasons for patrolling the campus. They admitted that while they were aware of the case, they could not confirm or deny that it was the reason that brought them to McDaniel. One officer had this to say about Bainbridge; “She isn’t missing – she’s a runaway. There is some evidence to suggest that she has done this sort of thing before.” He went on to say, “If she doesn’t want to be found, we aren’t going to find her.”
Details surrounding the case remain vague, but to date, the facts are as follows:
• Rebecca Paige Bainbridge is officially listed as an “endangered runaway”.
• She is five feet four inches tall with shoulder length straight red hair and brown eyes. She wears glasses and has a scar on her left knee.
• Before she was rumored to have come to Westminster, police had reason to believe that she was in Sykesville, MD – where she had run away to previously, according to Gazette.Net
Calls to Hagerstown sheriff’s department, Hagerstown city police, and MD state police, finally took The McDaniel Free Press to the Hagerstown state police, to the officer in charge of the case, Sgt. Dave Bowers. Like Webster, he said that there was no indication that Bainbridge was affiliated with the college, but that she did have a history of running away to college campuses that were close to her home. He could neither confirm nor deny the rumors that police had tracked the GPS signal on Bainbridge’s phone to a building in North Village.
According to The Charley Project, a website that has documented over 6,500 “cold cases” concerning missing persons, the term “endangered runaway” is used in cases where a minor has been missing for more than thirty days, or when there is indication that a minor is missing under circumstances that indicate she left voluntarily. At the time the signs went up on campus, Bainbridge had officially been missing for approximately 15 days.
If you have any information on the case, you are encouraged to call either the Westminster state police 410-386-3000, or Sgt. Dave Bowers with the Hagerstown State Police at 301-739- 2101.