I have a friend at work named Katie Coppens. Saturday night, her sister Brittany went to a bar roughly 15 miles away from her home which is in Norway (total of 25 miles from Iron Mountain). She was last seen that night with some guy that no one really knew.
24 hours passed and a report was filed leading to a ping of Brittany's phone. Odd thing that with the technology of today, the location of the phone was within a 5 mile radius. That in turn is a circle of space which has 10 miles from said circles edges. I Google Earthed a 5 mile radius around the center of Iron Mountain and what I saw was really upsetting. I did the same thing around the center of Marinette.
Just thinking, what really is a 5 mile radius. Quickly thinking, it really isn't that big. Seeing it from a different perspective is downright sickening.
I drove around the Iron Mountain area for almost 2 hours Sunday night hoping to maybe see her vehicle somewhere. I went to the various parks and some of the side roads; I even started driving up and down the streets of Iron Mountain. Yes, I was tired, but she is the sister of a work buddy, so I kept driving around. I even met other vehicles either entering or exiting some of the places I was checking. We traded where we looked and where we were going to look next.
After a bit, I went home feeling terrible because I couldn't find her or her vehicle. I started thinking all the 'what if's'..... What if it was one of you? How many people would look? Where would we start? All of a sudden, that 5 mile radius seemed more like 1 hundred miles. It's not a fun feeling knowing that you have to stop looking while knowing that someone hasn't been found.
I feel terrible for my friend. I feel terrible for her sister. I'm feeling guilt for not pushing my limits. Maybe if I kept looking, she would have been found sooner...
If ANY of you turn up missing, I won't stop looking until you are found. I promise you. What I'm feeling now, even knowing that she's back with her family and not even knowing if she was hurt or not is not cool.
Truly this world is fucked up...
