DA Ray Gricar's laptop is found
in area previously extensively searchedLaptop is missing its hard drive and telltale data
Sure looks fishy! CARPe diem...
August 1 , 2005 -- Missing Centre County, PA, District Attorney Ray Gricar's laptop computer has been found in the Susquehanna River, under a bridge where divers had previously extensively searched.
Pop-out hard drive? Centre County Administrator Tim Boyde says he believes Gricar had a Micron laptop such as this; its hard drive conveniently 'slides right out,' he says.
The laptop is missing its hard drive, says Bellefonte Police Chief Duane Dixon.
Fishermen pulled the laptop out of the Susquehanna River on Saturday, July 30, under the Rt. 45 bridge. The fishermen noticed the Centre County Commissioners' sticker on the laptop, and called the state police. A state police forensics expert discovered the hard drive was missing.
Centre County Director of Administrative Services Timothy T. Boyde says he believes Gricar had been issued a Micron laptop. "That's what the MIS department told me this afternoon," Boyde told yardbird.com. "It's a recent computer from the last year or so."
Boyde said he asked the MIS department whether the hard drive on the laptop was easily removable.
"That's what I asked," Boyde said. "I was told you just push a couple buttons and the hard drive just slides right out."
But that seems to be only an auxiliary hard drive. "I purchased the optional 4 Gb hard disk, which swaps with the removable CD-ROM," one owner of a Micon laptop writes on the web. (A review in PC World magazine furthermore states that Microns can "accomodate ... a second hard drive ... if you remove the (cd) drive."
It's not immediately clear if the internal, built-in hard drive in Gricar's laptop is so easily removable, or what happened to it.
Micron laptops are some of the most expensive in the Windows world. "It's not a standard issue," Boyde added. "But elected officials and department heads could request it. I think that's what Ray had."
The discovery of the laptop adds further twists to the mysterious disappearance of DA Ray Gricar. Gricar was last heard from on the afternoon of April 15, 2005. His car was found in Lewisburg, PA, near a bridge spanning the Susquehanna River. Divers had searched the river around the bridge for days.
The discovery of the laptop in an area that previously had been extensively searched shares yet another strange similarity to the death of Baltimore federal prosecutor Jonathan Luna. Luna vanished from his office in the Baltimore federal courthouse on the night of December 3, 2003.
A penknife belonging to Luna was found in mid-January, 2004, near, or on, a rock where Luna's body had been found weeks earlier.
Several hundred police and cadets had weeks earlier conducted extensive, grid-to-grid searches of the Luna crime scene, finding nothing. Luna had been stabbed thirty-six times, and was found drowned, lying face down in an icy stream, beneath the front of his idling car.
The discovery of the Luna's penknife later was used by some in law enforcement circles to bolster what others have called "far-fetched" suicide theories.
