This is a very painful story to cover. First I had to catch up on these three significant items of news: 1. They found Mickey Shunick’s bicycle in the Atchafalaya River. 2. After some arduous searches of not so great surveillance tape, they found positively identifiable images of Mickey Shunick riding along on her Schwinn bike. I might add, they have the exact times and locations of these sitings. 3. This is the darker angle of these new developments, footage of three, possibly suspicious vehicles close to Mickey’s by time and location. Two trucks and one clunker.
The newer white pickup truck seems to be more of an object of suspicion for Lafayette investigators. One anomaly, however, is that this white truck was going in a different direction than Mickey at the point in time when the camera captures it. Of course, the truck could have turned around and gone the other way on Landry Street. But why dwell so long on just one random truck driving along and minding its own business?
This is where Tasha Patterson enters the picture. You may have seen her interviewed on the news, but she confronted a similar truck before. A middle-aged white man may have given her a lift, and attempted to solicit her for sex. This weirdo bragged that he cruised around all the time looking for pretty girls. Well, I’m sure Tasha was freaked out by this incident, but she, perhaps, is providing investigators with a valuable tip here.
This is as creepy as it gets; just to think of this old geezer cruising around looking for girls. Wonder why he hasn’t been picked up by the cops before? Maybe he has. And yet I believe they’ll be able to find him now. They have a good description of the truck and Tasha Patterson will be able to identify him if cops pick him up. And then we hear about a possible connection of this white truck to Lauren Spierer in Bloomington, Indiana. But this is still a long shot, connecting these two cases together.
Any way you look at it, these new developments are a hard pill to swallow, coming out of a three day Memorial weekend. I will link you to a full stream of articles posted by KATC.com out of Lafayette, Louisiana. This is the most complete information on Mickey’s disappearance I’ve been able to find on the internet, and is continuous news dating back to May 19th, when her case was first reported. Many of the stories are about the support coming from the community there, where people are helping out in the search, putting on fundraisers, and doing whatever they can to lend a helping hand.
One theory is that maybe Mickey got in an accident. Whoever hit her then had to cover it up, so he throws her bike in the closest river he could find, which turns out was 27 miles from Brettly Wilson’s house and very close to I-10. I’d like to believe this hypothetical sketch of what may have happened to her, but I just don’t see it this way. Naturally, we haven’t heard yet of the condition of the bike, but I suspect it’s probably not that banged up. A more likely scenario, is that the perpetrator tossed the bike in the river at the last minute, then hightailed it out of there and onto the interstate!
I don’t believe this man in the white pickup truck is still in Lafayette. If he’s this crazy man who’s been roving around the country and abducting blondes, then he’s off to another state and another town to repeat his aberrant behavior. But somebody knows who this guy is. Or is somebody afraid of him? There’s a good likelihood of that. Paranoia returns ever so sneaky and persistent. It’s not just me that’s saying it. Do we have a traveling serial killer on our hands who targets young blonde coeds? I gotta cheer up somehow.
Searching for Mickey Shunick | KATC.com | Acadiana-Lafayette, Louisiana