Weathersfield
She checked it. It wasn’t her daughter.
She checked it again and again and again.
In the course of 45 minutes, Rogstad’s phone would beep some 20 times, as friends, family and others texted and called and commented. But each time she swiped the screen, her face fell in disappointment as the name she most wanted to see failed to pop up.
Tuesday marked six days since Rogstad and her husband, Chris, have spoken to their daughter, Autumn Sanville. The Springfield (Vt.) High School junior went missing on Thursday morning.
Police are actively searching for the 5-foot-4, 120-pound Sanville, who has long brown hair and green eyes. Anyone with information on her whereabouts is asked to call Vermont State Police.
Since her disappearance, police have issued two public updates on the investigation, but neither has shed much light on where the teen may be. The first update, issued the day after her mother reported her missing, said the situation did not appear to be suspicious at the time.
That, however, is not how Sanville’s mother and stepfather see it.
“I feel she is in danger,” a sobbing Rogstad said from her couch in the Weathersfield home she shares with her husband, daughter and two sons. “She wouldn’t go six days without calling me. She wouldn’t do this.”
She pleaded for her daughter to reach out.
“If she finds a way, I just want her to call me,” Rogstad said, her sobs intensifying. “I just need to hear her voice.”
The couple said there has been no activity on Sanville’s cellphone since the day she disappeared, something they said is extremely out of character for her.
After Sanville was reported missing, police “pinged” her cellphone, which led them to Hoyt’s Landing in Springfield, Vt., where they found Sanville’s 1999 Saab and little else. The car was locked and the contents of the teen’s school bag — absent her cellphone — were strewn across the backseat, the Rogstads said.
The ping leads police to believe that Hoyt’s Landing was the last place where Sanville’s cellphone was turned on, Chris Rogstad said, noting he feels the device now is “destroyed or powered off.”
“We just want her to come home,” he said. “We miss her.”
Vermont State Police Detective Sgt. Richard Holden, one of the officers investigating the case, said he was too busy on Tuesday to provide an update.
With her phone clutched in her hand, Karlene Rogstad retraced her daughter’s steps on the day she disappeared. She described a typical pre-dawn interaction with a teenager: conversations about clothing and hair, last-minute schoolwork and a quick kiss goodbye before Sanville headed off to school in her Saab around 7 a.m.
It would be hours before the Rogstads would learn Sanville never arrived.
The couple also would soon learn that their daughter had been late for school in the days leading up to Thursday, something they feel could be tied to her disappearance.
“If we had known she had been an hour late, she wouldn’t have been driving to school on Thursday,” Chris Rogstad said. “We would have brought her and picked her up because that is how we are.”
Springfield School District Superintendent Zach McLaughlin on Tuesday acknowledged “there was a breakdown in the line of communication” between school officials on Thursday. He said the high school “didn’t become aware of Ms. Sanville’s absence until Thursday afternoon, when contacted by Autumn’s mom.”
Because she had no reason to suspect her daughter wasn’t in school that day, Karlene Rogstad said, she didn’t become concerned about her daughter’s whereabouts until her husband told her Sanville never came home between school and her work shift at the Charlestown House of Pizza.
Sanville had told her mother she had to work on Thursday night; however, when Karlene Rogstad called her daughter’s boss, she found out Sanville wasn’t scheduled that evening.
Rogstad then set out on a search for her, knocking on the doors of her daughter’s friends and acquaintances, including at least one boy with whom Sanville had recently been friendly.
When he and others said they didn’t know where Sanville was, Rogstad went to police.
Rogstad believes her daughter willingly drove to the boat launch on Thursday morning and perhaps willingly got into someone else’s car.
“I have the personal feeling that whomever she is with isn’t letting her come back,” she said.
She begged for veracity from anyone who might have information about her daughter’s location, including Sanville’s group of close friends, whom Rogstad said may not be telling the whole story. She said it is unlikely Sanville is with her biological father because there is a no-contact provision in place.
The Rogstads said Sanville suffered from depression in previous years and that her grades had suffered when she started high school two years ago, but that both fronts have improved. They also said nothing like this has ever happened before.
They characterized their daughter as shy but outgoing and trusting — perhaps a “little too trusting,” they said, particularly of people who may have burned her in the past.
“She sees the good in everybody before she sees the bad,” her stepfather said.
Jordan Cuddemi can be reached at jcuddemi@vnews.com or 603-727-3248.