Marc Flemming
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Registered: Jan 2003
Local time: 04:51 PM
Location: Santa Cruz
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A teenager missing for eight days has been found alive in her wrecked car by a woman who said prayer and dreams led her to the site.
Laura Hatch, 17, last seen at a party Oct. 2, was found Sunday in her 1996 Toyota Camry about 150 feet below a road in this suburb east of Seattle, King County sheriff's deputies said.
Hatch was listed in serious condition at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, where she was being treated for severe dehydration, a possible blood clot near her brain, broken ribs, a broken leg and facial injuries, said her sister, Amy Hatch.
"We were afraid that we weren't going to find her, we weren't going to get her back," the sister told KING Television in Seattle. "This is the best thing that could happen because there were a million awful scenarios."
More than 100 friends and acquaintances from Creekside Covenant Church cheered and sang at a celebratory prayer service that initially had been scheduled as a vigil Sunday night.
"We had already given her up and let her be dead in our hearts," her mother, Jean Hatch, told KOMO-TV.
Hatch evidently went eight days without food or water, sheriff's Sgt. John Urquhart said, adding that there had been no indication of foul play.
"There was no police search," he added. "We felt she was most likely a runaway. Obviously, there was another reason."
Parents Jean and Todd Hatch hired a private investigator and on Saturday organized an unsuccessful search with 200 volunteers in areas near the place where the car was found.
Sha Nohr, a church member and mother of a friend of Hatch, said she had several vivid dreams of a wooded area with the message, "Keep going, keep going," after she went to bed Saturday night.
She said she awakened Sunday morning with an urgent need to look for Hatch, had her daughter join her and drove to the area where the crash occurred, stopping at one point, then leaving because "it just didn't feel right" and going to another spot.
Along the way, Nohr said, she prayed: "I just thought, 'Let her speak out to us,'"
At the second stop something drew her to clamber over a concrete barrier and more than 100 feet down a steep, densely vegetated embankment where she barely managed to discern the wrecked car in some trees.
She called to her daughter, who flagged down a passing motorist and the man helped Nohr get closer to the car as aid was summoned.
"I told her that people were looking for her and they loved her," Nohr recalled, "and she said, 'I think I might be late for curfew.' "
Source: AP
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10-11-2004 06:25 PM
