Teen Found Eight Days After Car Crash

SEATTLE — After eight days, Laura Hatch’s family had almost given the 17-year-old up for dead, and sheriff’s deputies had all but written her off as a runaway. Then she was found, badly hurt and severely dehydrated, but alive and conscious, in the back seat of a crumpled car, 200 feet down a ravine.

A volunteer searcher who said she had had several vivid dreams of a wooded area found the wrecked car in the trees on Sunday.

Hatch, who remained hospitalized Monday in serious condition, was last seen at a party Oct. 2. When she did not show up by the next day, her family filed a missing-person’s report.

The search was slowed because there had been underage drinking at the party, and the young people who attended would not say where it had been held, Sheriff’s Sgt. John Urquhart said.

On Oct. 6, detectives learned the party had been in a neighborhood east of Lake Washington and searched along her likely route home, Urquhart said. But prospects dimmed as the days passed.

“We had already given her up and let her be dead in our hearts,” her mother, Jean Hatch, told KOMO-TV.

Hatch’s parents organized a volunteer search Saturday, and the next day a volunteer who said she had dreams of a wooded area and heard the message, “Keep going, keep going,” clambered down a ravine and found the girl in a wrecked Toyota Camry in some trees.