Search continues for Va. Tech student

Morgan Harrington telephoned her friends Saturday night from outside John Paul Jones Arena at the University of Virginia to say she had left the Metallica concert, couldn't get back in and would find her own way home. She hasn't been heard from since.

A massive police and community search continued Wednesday for Harrington, 20, a Virginia Tech junior, whose absence became cause for alarm after her cellphone and purse were found by a passerby in a parking lot outside the arena. The case has garnered national media attention, a heavily trafficked Facebook page and even a posting to the Metallica band Web site, under the heading "One Of Our Fans Is Missing."

"We have a purse. We have a cellphone. We have a missing girl. Those are the facts," said Lt. Joe Rader of the Virginia State Police, speaking at a news conference Wednesday afternoon. "We do not know whether she is alive or has met some kind of ill fate. It's just that simple."

Harrington, an education major from Roanoke County, traveled to U-Va. with friends for the concert. They became separated about 8:40 p.m. when Harrington left the group to use the bathroom and wound up outside the arena, which allowed no reentry. She called her friends and said she "would find a way either to [meet] up with them or to get home," Rader said. Interviews with friends and other concert-goers and surveillance tapes suggest that she was last seen about 9:30 Saturday evening. Her family notified police Sunday that she had not come home as expected.

Police are working more than 100 leads from across the country and have completed a search of the arena and its vicinity, in part to ensure that Harrington had not become ill or injured and exposed to the chilly Charlottesville weather.

Rader said there were no signs of a struggle in the parking lot where the purse and phone were found, but stressed that the case had become "a criminal investigation in nature." He said a reward of at least $50,000 would be forthcoming.

Harrington was last seen wearing a black T-shirt celebrating the metal band Pantera, a black mini-skirt with black tights and knee-high black boots.