Transcript for New Jersey town rocked with Sarah Stern’s mysterious disappearance: Part 1
I need a minute. ?????? Tell us about Neptune city, New Jersey. Neptune city is this small little sleepy, tight-knit community right in the heart of Neptune township. Everybody in that town generally knows everyone else. It’s a couple miles from the beach. It touches on belmar and some of the shore communities. So there’s a lot of beach going. There’s a lot of the kids growing up as lifeguards. Neptune city more closely resembles middle America than it does the Jersey shore that’s portrayed on television. ?????? This is Bruce Springsteen country. This is the area that Bruce Springsteen is singing about, writing about in “Born to run.” ??? Baby we were born to run ??? This case would rock any town, much less a county, but it’s been especially impactful in a town like Neptune city because everyone is just so tight-knit there and close with one another. 911. Where is the emergency? It’s not an emergency. Actually on the belmar bridge there’s a car that’s abandoned. It’s off to the side of the road. I kind of got a strange feeling, like why would this older model car be completely dark late at night like that at 2:30 in the morning? It prompted me to call 911 and to give the report. The car did not appear to have been in an accident and it was left abandoned. And was there anybody inside the vehicle? I looked, no. There was a number of people we learned about later that had seen the car on the bridge. A couple of people called it in later once they realized what had happened. It’s sort of up here at the crest of the bridge. Like right about here was the car. It just looked broken down. It looked like he just popped the hood and was walking around the front of the car that I thought he was going to look under the hood and fix his car. And it started from there, tracking down who the owner of that vehicle was. This is a small town. Word travels fast. The cops know, obviously, a lot of people in this small town. They have a car parked on a bridge. They quickly find out it’s normally driven by a 19-year-old by the name of Sarah stern. The phone rang around 3:00 in the morning. They said, “Do you know anything about the car, gray oldsmobile?” And I said, “Yeah, my daughter drives that car.” A million thingso through your mind. You were in Florida. Yeah. So you drove from Florida back to New Jersey. At 3:30, 4:00 in the morning there’s no traffic. So you can drive pretty quick. Sarah stern was very well known to the community. Due to the fact that her family was very well known, Sarah was a kid that everybody knew. She was always around. That kind of threw everybody off with that car just being left at the top of that bridge with absolutely no good rhyme or reason as to why. No one knew where Sarah was, and they didn’t know why they couldn’t get in touch with her. She was attached to her phone like most 19-year-olds are. And there would be no reason for why her phone was off and she wasn’t taking calls, taking text messages on a Friday night. No answer on her phone. Police then immediately start investigating, and this becomes not just an abandoned car on a bridge, but a missing person. There’s this 19-year-old girl who has gone off the grid, and no one knows why. We’re standing in the middle of a softball field because you have that in connection with — Yeah. — Sarah as well. She was definitely a much better player than I was. But yeah, we played, in our elementary school together, and then we went on to play at Neptune high school, where we went. She was an athlete. She played softball, but towards the end of her high school career she became more devoted to arts and digital media. I think that Sarah was an artist. I think she was creative. I think she was a sweet girl, based upon everything I’ve ever heard about her. People loved her. She knew who her friends were and a lot of people cared about her. The school would do the windows for the holidays. Wow. She was really good. Wow. This is probably 2014, ’15. You could feel how much he loved being a dad to Sarah. Oh, it’s gorgeous, I mean really, she’s just so talented. She just amazed me at some of the stuff she did. Liam mcatasney was a childhood friend of Sarah’s. He went to high school with her. They lived just blocks away from each other. Liam started Woodrow Wilson school in seventh grade. That was the school that Sarah attended and they were instantly friends. I think she saw someone she could trust and someone who genuinely wanted to be there for her and be her friend. Preston was another friend of Sarah’s. They weren’t as close as Sarah and Liam were, but they were friends. Preston actually took Sarah to the junior prom. Preston and Liam became friends freshman year in high school. And you know, they obviously maintained a close friendship even after high school. They wound up moving in together. I think that she definitely thought of them as really good friends and someone she could confide in and trust and talk to. When you’re leafing through the Neptune high school yearbook, 2015, the trident, you really get a picture of this friend group and how it emerged. Then you see Sarah stern. She was most artistic. Her quote, “Be yourself. Don’t ever be what you think other people would want you to be.” There’s a best friend section of the yearbook where you see Liam and his twin bother, Seamus, and Preston. Liam mcatasney has a quote “The question isn’t what we are going to do. The question is, what aren’t we going to do?” Sarah wasn’t really interested in boys. She was very much doing her own thing, looking to pursue her art, start her career. She was never romantically involved with Liam, nor Preston. And she was happy to have them as good guy friends. They bonded over things like movies and video games and comic books, the things that she was genuinely into. Early in Sarah’s life, when she was a freshman in high school, her mom passed away from cancer. She definitely learned to lean on her dad and her friends and use that support system around her when she needed it. So she never had a reason to feel alone. Sarah and her dad were very close. They became even closer after her mother passed away. She started to develop, started to blossom, and she had this passion for art. For the YouTube scene. And she just had plans and dreams. “A reckless optimist” was her favorite quote. A reckless optimist. Yeah. You know, always looking at the bright side of things and always marching forward no matter what. So later that day, the second Uber driver calls the police. I called belmar’s dispatcher and explained to him I saw a car on the bridge, and I saw a male. And the dispatcher said, “A male? We’re not looking for a male, we’re looking for a female.” And I said, “No, it was definitely a male.” So that’s where the first hint of something weird was going on for me. After the 911 call was put in and police find Sarah stern’s car on the route 35 bridge, they are frantic to find where she may be, anyone who was with her or who had last seen her. And so they are knocking on doors. Almost time for me to go.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.
