A graduate student vanished along the Mississippi River after leaving a bar early Sunday morning — and the 22-year-old’s desperate parents are begging for help finding her days later.
Eliotte Heinz, who is enrolled at Viterbo College in La Crosse, Wisconsin, was last seen on camera walking near the waterfront at about 3:20 a.m. — around 50 minutes after she was last with friends at Bronco’s Bar in the city’s downtown.
Family members said she was on her way to her apartment — about a 30 minute walk from the bar.
“If you have any cameras, and you think you might have captured an image of Eliotte, please, call (La Crosse Police Department) let them have a look at your footage,” Eliotte’s mother, Amber Heinz, begged, according to the La Crosse Tribune.
“Even if you don’t think it’s a big deal, it’s a really big deal for her,” she added.
The family spent all day on Monday posting missing person flyers around La Crosse, according to News 8 Now.
Police and volunteers scoured the banks of the Mississippi River near where she was last seen on camera as well as the area around her apartment.
Eliotte’s brother, Brett Heinz, said her disappearance is “tearing [the] family apart.”
“Everyone is just really messed up right now. We don’t know where Eliotte is. We need to find her,” he told News 8 Now.
“She needs to be back home with us. That’s where she was trying to go and we need her to be able to complete that,” Amber said.
Heinz is described as being 5’4”, 120 pounds, with blonde hair and blue eyes. She was last seen wearing a white T-shirt and jean shorts, according to police.
La Crosse is a city of about 50,000 people in western Wisconsin across the Mississippi River from Minnesota.
