Teleka Patrick, a new doctor last seen at the hospital she worked at two weeks ago, has left few clues behind as authorities and her family search for answers in her disappearance.
CNN said Patrick, 33, was reported as missing after she failed to go to work at Kalamazoo's Borgess Medical Center on Dec. 6. Being a no-show for work was something that her father Matthias Patrick said the first-year medical resident in psychiatry in the Western Michigan University School of Medicine would never do.
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"(Missing work) is out of character where she is concerned," he told HLN's Nancy Grace on Wednesday, according to CNN. "She is always deliberate about what she's doing.”
Surveillance footage shows her trying to get a hotel room on Dec. 5 a Kalamazoo Radisson hotel, although her parents said they don’t know why she was there.
Her family said Patrick received an odd call during a lecture that changed her demeanor the day before she disappeared. The person in class who witnessed the incident said she did not say who was on the other line.
Prior to her disappearance, Patrick had lived in Kalamazoo for six months. She relocated there from California after earning her medical degree and a doctorate in biochemistry.
The night she went missing, her abandoned car was found 100 miles away in Indiana by a state trooper,
but her purse and keys were found at the medical center in Kalamazoo, ABC News reported. The uncrashed vehicle was in a ditch about 40 feet off of I-94. Indiana State Police Sgt. Rick Strong told CNN that dogs were used to track her scent.
"(The dogs) indicated that whoever was in that vehicle ... tracked back to that roadway" roughly 30 feet from the car, Strong said.
The dogs found no trace after that.
"We have scoured, searched, and looked at everything we could possibly look at — all the exits, all the businesses, all the hotels," Strong said.
"We posted fliers, we talked to neighbors (who live near the highway). We did a full-blown on-the-ground search in the wooded area north of where the car was."
Patrick's family told ABC News she had purchased a plane ticket to visit them in Florida for Christmas.
Investigators are asking anyone with information to call the Kalamazoo County Sheriff’s Office at 269-383-8748 or the Indiana State Police at 219-696-6242.
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