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American Morning

Missing Student

Aired December 03, 2003 - 09:08   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


SOLEDAD O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Joining us this morning David Sutfin. He is Dru Sjodin's uncle, and he is in Cross Lake, Minnesota this morning.
It's nice to see you. Thanks for joining us, Mr. Sutfin. I know this is a very difficult time for your family, so we certainly appreciate it.

Give me a sense of how everybody is holding up. I know that you happened to fly in to see the family, to visit sort of for an early Thanksgiving the day that Dru disappeared. How's everybody doing?

DAVID SUTFIN, MISSING WOMAN'S UNCLE: Everybody's pulling together. The family is strong, we're all talking about it. We all have one goal in mind, and that's bringing Dru back home, to her mother, to her father, to her brother. We all love Dru. We think that she's going to be with us very soon.

O'BRIEN: We had an opportunity to talk to some of her friends and her roommate yesterday, and you could tell just the sheer love that they have for this young woman is really pretty amazing. Tell us a little bit more about this young woman. She seemed to be juggling a lot in order to put herself through school.

SUTFIN: Oh, she's a very resourceful young lady, very bright, very talented. She's an industrial art major. But she could have gone into music. She's getting super grades in school. She is somebody who can do it all. She was actually volunteering over the Halloween weekend to help children at the science center up in Grand Forks, North Dakota. She had a lot to give to people, and she was so outgoing that it makes it difficult to understand why this would happen to her or any other young lady.

O'BRIEN: She seems like a very remarkable young woman.

Talk to me a little bit about the search, and the job you think the police are doing in this case. Are you feeling confident in their abilities to track her down and bring her home? And tell me a little bit about the searchers. There have been so many who've been just pouring out to help.

SUTFIN: Oh, yes, it's been wonderful. From the second day on, I was up in Grand Forks with her father, Alan Sjodin, and we were talking about the number of law enforcement officials who came together so quickly. We had the Grand Forks Police Department, the sheriff of Pope County, which is in Minnesota, we had the border patrol, ATF, we had posses from other surrounding counties. We had the FBI. They all came together very quickly and have been doing just a wonderful job of working together and keeping the family informed as they progress through this search. The young volunteers have shown such strength.

There's a group from Piquot Lakes, where Dru grew up, up there searching every day in the cold, doing it with their own money, and their own time, taking time away from college. We know that some of them have expended some of their resources to continue with the search, and so we're going to try to help them.

We also had a young man here in Lake Piquot that was out trying to get billboard space to put Dru's name and her plight up on the highways. And this young man had no job, had no money to pay for his phone bill, and yet he was out collecting money so that we could get her face on a billboard. He's done a wonderful job.

O'BRIEN: I think lots of people pulling together in this case. We certainly wish you the best of luck and are hopeful that you're going to get some very good news very soon.

David Sutfin, thanks for joining us this morning. Appreciate it, and our best to all of your family members, as well.

SUTFIN: Thank you, Soledad.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com







Aired December 3, 2003 - 09:08   ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
SOLEDAD O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Joining us this morning David Sutfin. He is Dru Sjodin's uncle, and he is in Cross Lake, Minnesota this morning.
It's nice to see you. Thanks for joining us, Mr. Sutfin. I know this is a very difficult time for your family, so we certainly appreciate it.

Give me a sense of how everybody is holding up. I know that you happened to fly in to see the family, to visit sort of for an early Thanksgiving the day that Dru disappeared. How's everybody doing?

DAVID SUTFIN, MISSING WOMAN'S UNCLE: Everybody's pulling together. The family is strong, we're all talking about it. We all have one goal in mind, and that's bringing Dru back home, to her mother, to her father, to her brother. We all love Dru. We think that she's going to be with us very soon.

O'BRIEN: We had an opportunity to talk to some of her friends and her roommate yesterday, and you could tell just the sheer love that they have for this young woman is really pretty amazing. Tell us a little bit more about this young woman. She seemed to be juggling a lot in order to put herself through school.

SUTFIN: Oh, she's a very resourceful young lady, very bright, very talented. She's an industrial art major. But she could have gone into music. She's getting super grades in school. She is somebody who can do it all. She was actually volunteering over the Halloween weekend to help children at the science center up in Grand Forks, North Dakota. She had a lot to give to people, and she was so outgoing that it makes it difficult to understand why this would happen to her or any other young lady.

O'BRIEN: She seems like a very remarkable young woman.

Talk to me a little bit about the search, and the job you think the police are doing in this case. Are you feeling confident in their abilities to track her down and bring her home? And tell me a little bit about the searchers. There have been so many who've been just pouring out to help.

SUTFIN: Oh, yes, it's been wonderful. From the second day on, I was up in Grand Forks with her father, Alan Sjodin, and we were talking about the number of law enforcement officials who came together so quickly. We had the Grand Forks Police Department, the sheriff of Pope County, which is in Minnesota, we had the border patrol, ATF, we had posses from other surrounding counties. We had the FBI. They all came together very quickly and have been doing just a wonderful job of working together and keeping the family informed as they progress through this search. The young volunteers have shown such strength.

There's a group from Piquot Lakes, where Dru grew up, up there searching every day in the cold, doing it with their own money, and their own time, taking time away from college. We know that some of them have expended some of their resources to continue with the search, and so we're going to try to help them.

We also had a young man here in Lake Piquot that was out trying to get billboard space to put Dru's name and her plight up on the highways. And this young man had no job, had no money to pay for his phone bill, and yet he was out collecting money so that we could get her face on a billboard. He's done a wonderful job.

O'BRIEN: I think lots of people pulling together in this case. We certainly wish you the best of luck and are hopeful that you're going to get some very good news very soon.

David Sutfin, thanks for joining us this morning. Appreciate it, and our best to all of your family members, as well.

SUTFIN: Thank you, Soledad.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com