A Virginia Tech student is charged with abduction and murder after a 13-year-old Blacksburg girl, Nicole Lovell, went missing last week. Dan and Gil Harrington, parents of a slain daughter who disappeared from Charlottesville six years ago, speak out.
“We have just heard that the body of your precious daughter, Nicole, has been found and will be brought to the medical examiner’s office in Roanoke,” the Harringtons wrote to Lovell’s family.
The local group they founded, Help Save the Next Girl, posted their message on a Facebook page called Help Find Nicole Lovell, where more than 4,000 Facebook users posted information before Lovell’s death and grieved once the middle-schooler was found dead.
“That office is just a few blocks from our home, and our daughter also spent time in that place,” the Harringtons added.
Their daughter, 20-year-old Morgan Harrington, was abducted from a Metallica concert at the John Paul Jones Arena in 2009. Jesse Matthew is charged with her death, as well as the death of UVA student Hannah Graham.
Nicole Lovell was last seen in her family’s apartment home between 7pm and midnight January 27. Her remains were found January 30—about 100 miles from home, on the side of Route 89 in North Carolina, according to Blacksburg police.
A family member found Lovell’s dresser pushed against her bedroom door and suspected that she climbed out of her window, the Roanoke Times reported.
Before police located her remains, the family had already expected the worst. Lovell required daily medication for a liver transplant and didn’t take the medicine with her when she left, police said in a press conference. Lovell’s mother, Tammy Weeks, spoke to the media about how her daughter survived a liver transplant, MRSA and lymphoma by age 5, adding that Lovell was bullied at school for the scar left by the operation.
Virginia Tech student David E. Eisenhauer, 18, was charged January 30 with murder and felony abduction. Nineteen-year-old Natalie Keepers, who is also a Tech student, was charged January 31 with a felony count of improper disposal of a dead body and a misdemeanor for accessory after the fact in the commission of a felony.
Blacksburg police said investigators determined that Eisenhauer and Lovell were acquaintances. “Eisenhauer used this relationship to his advantage to abduct the 13-year-old and then kill her.”