Hope — from Oakland to Iowa
College student with Bay Area roots still missing after 3-week search
Mollie Tibbetts was in kindergarten or first grade at Corpus Christi Catholic School in Oakland when her father was robbed at gunpoint in front of their home in the city’s leafy Glenview neighborhood.
He wasn’t hurt. Living on the edge of Oakland, Rob Tibbetts chalked it up to big-city problems.
But three weeks ago, the day after his daughter went missing from a tiny town of cornfields and grain elevators in America’s heartland, he and his new wife were incredulous as they got off the plane in Iowa from California.
“How does the All-American girl who lives in a Norman Rockwell village and is dating the All-American boy next door disappear from a place like this without a trace?” Mollie’s stepmother, Kacey Auston-Tibbetts, asked.
It’s a mystery without an an-
swer. Mollie Tibbetts’ disappearance July 18 during her nightly jog through the farming community of Brooklyn, Iowa, has received international attention. Police are searching pig farms and drainage ditches, looking for clues to find the 20-year-old University of Iowa student who moved here 11 years ago with her mother and two brothers when her parents divorced.
In most ways, Oakland, a city of 420,000, and Brooklyn, a town of 1,500, are worlds apart. But the Tibbetts family found a deep sense of community in both — and is relying on each to help get them through the most heart-wrenching time of their lives.
In Brooklyn, more than 300 friends, neighbors and strangers gathered the first day to help search. So much food was prepared for the volunteers, half was left over. Every day since Mollie vanished they have posted missing posters and worn T-shirts emblazoned with the image of the pretty young woman with long dark hair and a big smile.
The local sheriff told Mollie’s mother he’s never seen anything like it.
In Oakland, meanwhile, news of Mollie’s disappearance quickly traveled through email and social media back to their old neighbors on El Centro Avenue just off of Park Boulevard and the families of Corpus Christi Parish, where Rob Tibbetts was active in the men’s club and Mollie’s mother, Laura Calderwood, volunteered on the parent board and other committees.
They haven’t been parishioners since they divorced and moved in 2007, but prayers are offered up at daily Masses for Mollie’s safe return, and their old friends are donating to the reward fund that by Tuesday had grown to more than $300,000. Calderwood gets calls twice a day from the parents of her children’s former classmates at the Piedmont school whose front door crosses the Oakland border.
Principal Katie Murphy, who has been at the school more than 30 years, still has class photos of the three Tibbetts children pinned on the bulletin board across from her desk — the ones their mother sent back a year or two after they moved to Iowa.
“I have never taken them down. It’s just a reminder of who they were and how they were part of us,” she said. “We’ve had families move and life changes, and they’re still a part and still welcome. They used to come back and visit whenever they came back to California.”
Calderwood moved her children to Iowa for many reasons: She was a real estate agent, and the California housing market was starting to collapse with the oncoming of the Great Recession. Child care was costing $750 per month per child, and her childhood memories were beckoning her home. She wanted Jake, Mollie and Scott to experience the freedom she had, when she could “wander 300 acres” to swim in a pond or climb a tree. Scott was in first grade when they enrolled in Brooklyn schools, and all three walked to and from school each day — “no picking them up in carpool lines,” Calderwood said.
All three children thrived. Mollie starred in school plays since sixth grade, ran on the track team and won state speech contests every year for three years. She was a psychology major and planned to pursue master’s and doctorate degrees. The whole family has remained loyal San Francisco Giants fans.
“I loved my time in the Bay Area, but I have no regrets about raising them here,” Calderwood said. “They all got to shine.”
And yes, she said, she did believe this little Iowa town was a safer place to raise her children.
“But I never had the illusion that nothing could happen here. Things have happened here,” she said. “Things happen everywhere.”
The night she disappeared, Mollie texted her mom at 7:30 p.m., saying she was going for a run — something she did most nights. She was living with her boyfriend in Brooklyn for the summer, but he was out of town that night and police say he isn’t a suspect. Mollie was likely wearing her Fitbit on her wrist. Her phone is missing, but her wallet and purse were still home.
Police won’t say what they’ve done to try to track her through technology or other means, and the family is trying to keep the faith that she is still alive.
Since Mollie vanished, her father, who still lives in the East Bay and works as a marketing executive at HOK, a San Francisco architecture firm, has been staying at a hotel in Grinnell, 15 minutes west of Brooklyn.
He’s feeling useful, fielding more than a dozen media calls a day, doing his best to keep her name and picture in the public eye, hoping someone saw something and will come forward.
“It feels really good to do that, to fight back, to have some control in a really uncontrollable situation with no information,” Tibbetts, 59, said.
Despite the distance, he’s remained close with his children through the years. Every weekend, he spends hours on the phone with all three. He spoke with Mollie a few days before she disappeared. She was about to sign a lease for her first college apartment in the fall and get the first stamp in her new passport for a trip to the Dominican Republic to celebrate a friend’s wedding.
They were last together in June at Rob Tibbetts’ wedding at Bass Lake, a vacation spot south of Yosemite where the family has returned over the years. Mollie rode a Jet Ski and hiked the falls at Yosemite and, at the wedding, gave a toast to her father and new stepmother.
“It was polished and funny and poignant,” he said. “At the end she said I was her best friend.”
No one is ready to give up hope.
“It’s scary for everyone,” Tibbetts said. “We’re just going to keep fighting. We have a really good team.”
From Brooklyn to Oakland, everyone is invested, he said, whether with manpower, with sustenance or prayer. And no matter what happens, he said, “We’ll just keep going until we figure this out.”