A Homecoming That Breaks a Town’s Heart

Dru Sjodin’s family and friends gathered to remember the slain college student Friday, their cars lining the streets for several blocks around the packed church parking lot.

Car antennas and the church doors were adorned with pink ribbons -- Sjodin’s favorite color -- as mourners arrived for the four-hour wake, held about 10 miles from her hometown of Pequot Lakes.

Sjodin’s body was found in a northwest Minnesota ravine April 17, five months after she disappeared from a shopping mall parking lot in Grand Forks, N.D.

Inside Crosslake Lutheran Church, a mound of flowers surrounded the University of North Dakota student’s silver casket. Above it sat a large photograph of a smiling Sjodin.

“I think everyone wanted Dru to come home, and she is home now,” said Linda Ulland, a neighbor of Sjodin’s mother. “That’s what is important about today.”

Ulland said that the community had bonded through the search for Sjodin and that the case had sparked interest in searching for other missing people.

“There has been a lot of good that has come out of this evil,” she said.

Mourners were offered packets of flower and vegetable seeds that said “Dru Sjodin 1981-2003” and bore a quote from Quaker philosopher Elton Trueblood: “A man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life when he plants shade trees under which he knows full well he will never sit.”

Her funeral will be held today.

Sjodin’s body was found about a mile outside of Crookston, the hometown of the man charged with her kidnapping.

Alfonso Rodriguez Jr., a convicted sex offender, has pleaded not guilty. He remains in the Grand Forks County jail.

A trial date has not been set.

The investigation continues, with federal prosecutors considering a federal charge of murder during a kidnapping that could carry the death penalty.