Investigators were checking into dozens of leads about a pickup truck spotted near where a missing Indiana University student was last seen, police said Thursday, a day after releasing security camera images from the night the woman disappeared.
Nearly 300 tips had come in to the Bloomington Police Department since security camera pictures of the truck were made public, with the vast majority of them regarding the vehicle, Capt. Joe Qualters said.
The truck was seen driving around a city block in the area and about the time 20-year-old Lauren Spierer of Greenburgh, N.Y., was walking alone toward her apartment about 4:30 a.m. June 3 after a night of partying with friends.
Qualters said investigators didn't know whether the truck had any role in Spierer's disappearance and that it was too soon to know whether any of the tips were credible.
"It's an ongoing effort to track down those leads," he said. "We're hopeful that there's some valuable information that comes from that."
Spierer's mother, Charlene Spierer, seemed to address college students as she stood before a bank of television cameras during a Thursday news conference, holding up a security camera image of her daughter taken just before she left her apartment building and only hours before she vanished.
"This could be you going out on a night with your friends to just have a good time and be happy and share your life with everybody," she said. "I'm begging you to put yourself in Lauren's place. What would you want your friends to do for you?"
