D.C. Police Search Woods for Missing USC Student

More than a dozen police officers canvassed a heavy patch of woods Thursday near a popular jogging trail in Washington’s Adams Morgan neighborhood, looking for clues to the whereabouts of Chandra Ann Levy, who has been missing for about three weeks and was known to frequent the area, police said.

The search, though far more thorough than one about two weeks ago, turned up nothing in the area under the Calvert Street Bridge in Rock Creek Park, Police Chief Charles Ramsey said.

Ramsey said police learned that Levy often walked along or near the asphalt trail, which is flanked by heavy woods on the west and Rock Creek Parkway on the east. That was the sole reason for Thursday’s search, Ramsey said.

“If anyone did have an accident or something happened to them there in that wooded area, then it’s worth taking a look,” he said. Officers as well as police recruits and cadaver-seeking dogs searched the area.

Levy was last seen April 30, and her mother reported receiving an e-mail from her the next morning. After an internship at the federal Bureau of Prisons, she had been preparing to go home to Modesto and then to her graduate school commencement at USC.

She had canceled her membership at a local gym, and she was arranging to break the lease on her apartment so she could go home for good, the apartment manager said.

When police searched Levy’s apartment, they found her fully packed luggage alongside her credit cards, driver’s license and cellular phone. Her keys were missing, and no signs of a struggle were apparent, police said.

Police have said they are exploring the possibility that she vanished after setting off on a last-minute errand or a walk, which would explain why her house keys were missing and most of her belongings were found inside her locked apartment.

Ramsey reiterated Thursday that police have no evidence to suggest a crime.

He said the jogging trail’s proximity to the apartment of Rep. Gary A. Condit (D-Ceres), several blocks away, had no bearing on the search.

“It’s just a coincidence that he lives there and that he knows her,” he said.

Condit has described himself as a good friend of Levy’s, and his aides have said the two were not romantically involved.

Thursday’s search followed an anonymous tip that Levy had been spotted near Reno. Detectives of the Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Department in Modesto flew there with fliers in the hopes that she might turn up.

But Kelly Huston of the Sheriff’s Department said that authorities were unable to substantiate any details of the sighting and now consider the tip to be “no different than the more than 100 calls we’ve received so far” about this case.