Buffalo Grove teen's friends cling to hope

Buffalo Grove teen's friends cling to hope
Originally published Friday, Oct. 26, 2007

By Burt Constable and Nadia Malik
Daily Herald Staff Writers

Wisconsin divers today once again will search for a body in the muddy Baraboo River, as loved ones and friends of missing Stevenson High School senior Lee S. Cutler cling to slight hope the 18-year-old will unexpectedly show up alive somewhere else.
"We're already deeply into the unexpected," notes Dan de Garzia, a family friend who has become the spokesman for Cutler's parents and the hundreds of teenagers and parents who continue to meet nightly in person or online in an attempt to solve the mystery that has gripped them since the Buffalo Grove teenager was reported missing Saturday.
An active and friendly student who turned 18 early this month, Cutler attended a birthday dinner for a friend Friday evening, and was in a small group of teens who then spent the night at another friend's house.
Cutler dropped one of the teens at home at 9:50 a.m. Saturday in Buffalo Grove but never showed up for his part-time job at Westfield Hawthorn shopping center in Vernon Hills.
Instead, he apparently drove by himself to rural Wisconsin without telling anyone. The teen's locked car was discovered at 3:30 a.m. Monday along the Baraboo River just south of the Wisconsin Dells. His yarmulke, a blanket and his school backpack - containing letters to and from family members, but no obvious clues to his disappearance - were found on a muddy riverbank near a Highway 33 bridge east of Baraboo.
Rescue workers on foot, in airplanes and in a helicopter with a heat-sensing infrared camera found no sign of the missing teen in the hilly forest or nearby cornfields this week; neither did a dog trained to sniff out dead bodies.
Friends continue to support each other through a facebook.com discussion group called "lets find lee!!"
"Don't go it alone. We have all seen how strong we are together, so let's not stop now," one Thursday posting reads. "Take care of each other today. We still have some road ahead of us and we need to keep up both our emotional and physical strength."
"We're encouraging students who have questions and concerns to talk with us," says Jim Conrey, a spokesman for Stevenson High School, which has counseling stations for students who need them. "Unfortunately, like many people, we're a little uncertain about what's going on ourselves.
"We don't know the circumstances that led him to do what he did. We're not sure what the underlying factors are, so to some degree it's difficult to talk about it."