State College: Real Life Soap Opera

I have begun reviewing the police blotter of my old alma mater, State College, PA. It's the basic description of crime in a college town: theft of construction materials, stolen cameras, vandalism, and about one physical altercation a week.

Then the district attorney vanished without a trace. I speak of Ray Gricar, Centre County DA. He is the man who convicted my fellow Delta classmate Gillian Robbins and sent her to prison for the Penn State HUB shootings in, if I recall correctly, 1996. Maybe 1997.

I'm not faulting the guy for doing this. Quite the contrary: good job, Ray. I'm just saying that my first exposure to Ray Gricar was all wrapped up in a very tragic series of events that left a dark cloud in State College that in many ways persists to this day. I guessed this was the last I'd ever hear of this man.

I guessed wrong. Ray Gricar vanished, Houdini-like, on April 15 of this year, and I've been following the story on the State College police blotter since a few months ago. His car was found abandoned, and someone eventually found his missing laptop a few miles from where his car was found, sans hard drive.

OK, that's weird. Can't get weirder, right? He must have stepped on some mafia toes and found himself wearing cement shoes at the bottom of the Susquehanna, right? Wrong. I record the story here for posterity. Some woman thinks she found Ray Gricar in Nacogdoches, asked him for directions, and took a picture of him with her camera phone. This is has just gotten bizarre. Sure, it starts with a missing person. They give his girlfriend a polygraph and start finding his belongs strewn around Lewisburg, and then he may or may not have been dining at a Chili's in Nacogdoches. Nacogdoches. Where the hell is my Soap Opera Digest, because this storyline is just unreal.

Gricar Spotted In Texas?
(Source: Centre Daily Times) -- A woman who believes she spotted missing Centre County District Attorney Ray Gricar in Texas has forwarded photographs to local investigators.

According to Bellefonte Police, the photos the woman took with her cell phone have been viewed by Gricar's girlfriend, Patty Fornicola. Fornicola said the man in the photos may be Gricar.

The woman who submitted the photos said she recognized Gricar from photos she saw on the news. When she spotted the man she thought was Gricar in a Chili's restaurant in Nacogdoches, Texas last week, she approached him and asked for directions. The man told her he was not from the area. He said he was from Tennessee, but he did not speak with a Southern accent.

Police are awaiting the woman's cell phone, from which they will attempt to retrieve higher quality images. The images they have received via email are of a low resolution.

Gricar disappeared April 15th. His last contact was a phone call he made to Fornicola, telling her that he was taking a drive along Route 192. Gricar was reported missing 12 hours later, and his car was found in Lewisburg the following day.