Juilliard Student Is Strangled

A woman found strangled in an upper Manhattan park was identified through dental records Wednesday as a missing Juilliard drama student, the medical examiner’s office said.

The death of Sarah Fox, 21, was declared a homicide after the autopsy determined the cause, said Ellen Borakove, a spokeswoman for the medical examiner’s office.

Fox, who lived less than a mile from the spot in Inwood Hill Park where her body was found, was last seen May 19 as she left home to jog or work out at a gym.

Volunteer searchers found the body Tuesday in a wooded ravine south of the Henry Hudson Parkway, near the northern tip of Manhattan.

She was a third-year drama student at the Juilliard School, one of the nation’s most elite institutions for music and drama. Among its drama alumni are William Hurt, Elizabeth McGovern, Christopher Reeve and Kevin Kline.

The discovery left students at the school shaken.

“It can’t be possible,” voice major Solange Merdiniam, 20, said tearfully.

Fox previously attended Southern New Jersey Academy of the Performing Arts.

Elsewhere, police and volunteers in Corvallis, Ore., were searching for a 19-year-old college student who they said might have been kidnapped.

Brooke Wilberger, a student at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, was last seen Monday at an apartment complex managed by her sister and brother-in-law.

Police Capt. Robert Deutsch said Wilberger’s purse, keys and other personal items had been left in her sister’s apartment. A piece of her clothing was found in the parking lot, a possible indication that she was abducted, he said. Her car also was still in the lot.