National Guard Joins Hunt for Missing College Student

National Guardsmen lowered cameras through river ice and scoured buildings and roads in North Dakota and neighboring Minnesota on Friday in a search for Dru Sjodin, the college student apparently kidnapped from a mall parking lot.

The search, on foot and in military vehicles, was suspended at nightfall after covering nearly 400 square miles. The operation was to resume today.

“We did not have a find today, but we’re still hoping to find something before the weekend is over,” Maj. Mike Fonder of the Grand Forks County Sheriff’s Department said late Friday.

“It’s going to be slow and steady,” Maj. Mark Vavra, a spokesman for the Minnesota National Guard, said as teams searched under a bridge near Thompson, 10 miles south of Grand Forks.

Vavra would not say why that stretch of the Red River was targeted. According to an affidavit unsealed Tuesday, searchers had found the missing woman’s shoe under another bridge about 15 miles away.

Sjodin, 22, of Pequot Lakes, Minn., was last heard from Nov. 22 as she spoke to her boyfriend by cellphone after leaving her job at a Victoria’s Secret store in Grand Forks.

Prosecutors have charged Alfonso Rodriguez Jr., 50, a convicted rapist released from prison this year, with kidnapping her. He said he was innocent, and remained in jail on $5-million bail.

Police had said that DNA tests showed that Sjodin’s blood was in Rodriguez’s car, and a knife found in his trunk matched a sheath found near Sjodin’s car.

The National Guard was called in to search Friday when temperatures that fell to 10 degrees below zero made it dangerous for volunteers.

Guardsmen wearing life jackets and insulated clothes drilled holes through a foot of ice on the river, then lowered cameras to allow them to see the bottom. Vavra said the water was murky, with visibility only a couple of feet.

About 300 people -- sheriff’s deputies, State Patrol officers and National Guard members from North Dakota and Minnesota -- also searched roads, ditches and abandoned buildings. They had planned to cover 800 square miles by Sunday night.