A student from Dartmouth College named Kexin Cai was last seen on Friday and was last seen on Monday in the Connecticut River. He was found dead.
Someone fishing along the river in Windsor, Vermont, “alerted authorities to a sighting” around 4 p.m. on Monday. Authorities were sent to the area and later identified Cai’s body that they pulled from the water.
The police said that their early investigation didn’t point to any wrongdoing.
On May 17, the Lebanon Police Department was told that the 26-year-old Dartmouth doctoral student had not been seen or heard from since May 15. A report of missing people was then made.
Someone told the LPD that Cai was last seen riding an e-bike away from her home in an unknown direction on the afternoon of May 15, a Wednesday.
“The Police Department sent people to the area right away to search it.” “A full investigation and search continued all weekend and into Monday,” the LPD said at the time in a press release.
Surveillance video from two nearby companies showed Cai getting on her e-bike around 6 p.m. that Wednesday and riding south on NH RT 10 toward West Lebanon. Police say that on May 20, a “passing motorist” saw her e-bike in the Boston Lot Conservation Area.
People from around the Boston Lot and Wilder Dam areas, along with Dartmouth Safety and Security, the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department, good Samaritans, and others, joined the search for Cai in the days after she went missing.
Cai, who is Chinese, is said to have checked herself into the campus medical center before she went missing because she was having a mental health crisis.
According to a statement released Monday, Jon Kull, head of the Guarini School of Graduate and Advanced Studies, she was in her second year of a PhD program in psychological and brain sciences. Her research focused on communication problems in people with autism.
“Kexin’s advisor said she was a very smart, humble, and friendly researcher.” There were cats on every poster and show she made because she loved them so much. She loved living in the Upper Valley. “This is where she learned how much she loved hiking, skiing, and road trips,” Kull wrote.
