Hundreds of volunteers from Hasidic communities in Brooklyn and upstate New York came to Connecticut's most rural corner today to help the police and firefighters search for a 14-year-old Brooklyn girl who disappeared on Wednesday when a stop on a school field trip went badly awry.
Authorities said 237 students from a Hasidic school in Brooklyn, Tomer Devorah High School, were on their way to Old Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts when they stopped at the 1,500-acre Bigelow Hollow State Park here. The stop was intended to last two hours and give the students a chance to eat lunch and walk in the woods.
Many Became Lost
But many of the students became lost. One group returned to the bus almost two hours later than expected. Two girls wandered miles away, ending up on Interstate 84, where a motorist picked them up and drove them to the park.
One girl, Suri Feldman, did not return.
The teen-ager was apparently walking ahead of two other ninth graders when she suddenly disappeared.
"She was leading us the whole way and all of a sudden we lost her," Frimette Gorelick, a classmate, told a television station on Wednesday. "And then we called her name and started yelling, and we didn't find her."
After two days of searching, the authorities said tonight that they had found no sign of the girl, whom classmates described as meek and unlikely to wander off on her own.
Man Seen in Woods
The Connecticut State Police said they were following up on more than 100 tips, including reports that a man had been in the woods and had spoken to the students. They declined to speculate on what might have happened to Suri, although they said she would have been able to survive in the woods Wednesday night, when temperatures were in the 40's.
Searchers used bloodhounds and helicopters to scour the rocky, wooded hills and mossy wetlands of the park today, but the effort was called off at about 3:30 P.M., said a spokesman for the state police, Sgt. Scott R. O'Mara. Six bloodhounds continued to look for traces of the girl, but they too were brought in by 6:30 P.M., authorities said.
The trip was suspended after Suri disappeared, and the buses returned to Brooklyn Wednesday night. Today, New York law-enforcement officials flew two of the students back to Connecticut, hoping they could pinpoint where they and Suri had become separated.
By all accounts, the rest stop in the park went awry quickly. Dozens of the teen-agers straggled back to the buses long after they were scheduled to return.
But school officials today defended the rest stop, saying the students were adequately supervised by 11 chaperones, who accompanied the students into the woods.
"Kids like to get out and check out what's going on around them," said Rabbi Schlomo Kolodny, the director of the school. He said that he supported the teachers' decision to go into the woods.
Some students said today that the trails in the park were poorly marked, and Rabbi Kolodny said he was told that the students had seen a man altering trail signs. At first, he said, the students thought the man was working for the park.
Local residents who know the woods say it is easy to get lost there, with hills and gullies that cut off the view of where a hiker has been.
"You take somebody from New York City and dump them in the middle of the woods, it's just like taking somebody from here and dumping them in New York City," said Brian Lambert of Stafford, who spent 10 hours on Wednesday searching and another full day today supervising volunteer teams.
Mr. Lambert and other local searchers said they doubted that Suri was still in the park. Most of it has been searched, and they said that since Suri was wearing a skirt, it is unlikely that she would have left the trails, because of the thick mountain laurel.
Woody Aborn, a truck driver who stopped after work tonight to volunteer, said that although the woods are large, anyone traveling in a straight line for three miles or more would cross a road. The difficulty, he said, is staying in a straight line.
"You don't want to get in there without a compass," said Mr. Aborn, who had a compass pinned to his shirt pocket.
Leah Malkey, a fellow student on the trip, said today in Brooklyn that Suri was "not too courageous."
She added: "She would have common sense to stay in one place. She's not too strong emotionally."
Today, under leaden skies, people tried to remain optimistic. The search presented the unusual tableaux of Hasidim in traditional garb combing the woods alongside rural firefighters and state troopers, and many spoke in awe of the impact that the Hasidic community's call for help had evoked.
"The determination to try to find this kid conquers anything," said Paul Lebowitz, a Brooklyn resident who is also chief of operations for the Metropolitan Ambulance Service. "There's a purpose here."
Mr. Lebowitz said he heard of Suri's disappearance on the 11 o'clock news last night, turned to his wife and said, "I have to go."
Another searcher, Yankel Greenberg of Suffern, N.Y., in Rockland County, said he left Brooklyn in a chartered bus about 4 A.M. after the grand rabbi of the Hasidim centered in New Square, N.Y., David Twersky, convened the volunteers to bless their efforts at the rabbi's home.
"There's one human being in trouble," Mr. Greenberg said.
Suri's father, Jacob, and her oldest brother, Juda, 31, were helping with the search today, authorities said.
At her home in Brooklyn, several people were inside with the girl's mother.
"We're praying and waiting," said one of her brothers, who declined to give his name.
Suri, one of 15 children, is described as about 5 feet tall and weighing 85 pounds. She has blue eyes and black, shoulder-length hair. She was wearing a blue plaid shirt with flowers and carrying a pink bag with green stripes when she disappeared.
