Missing teen has been serious about her goals, faith and personal safety

By FINN J. JOHN
Gazette-Times reporter

When Brooke Wilberger played soccer in high school, her family could always find her on the field because of the volume of her voice. If an opponent shoved an elbow, Brooke would scream, "Get off my back."

When she disagreed with what her teacher said about the Mormon church, Brooke challenged him.

At 5 feet, 4 inches, Brooke is petite but athletic. And when she returned home from her freshman year of college in April, she was 10 pound heavier from lifting boxes at her delivery job. "It's all muscle," she told her mom.

Brooke is someone who would have resisted if someone tried to kidnap her.

Was she abducted against her will?

Her family certainly thinks so.

The whole year when she was away at college, Brooke called her mother just about every other day. She talked to her brother, Spencer, virtually every day. She sent e-mail letters to her boyfriend, Justin Blake, who's in the middle of a two-year mission in Venezuela. What are the chances someone like that would vanish and drop all contact with her family voluntarily?

Not good, says her dad, Greg Wilberger.

"People ask us if she could have run away or something," he said. "And I say, ‘If you can go insane between 7:30 and 10 o'clock, then yes.' But I don't think you can go insane that fast."

A good day goes bad

May 24 started out uneventfully for Brooke Wilberger.

The 19-year-old student, home for the summer from Brigham Young University, got up around 6:30 a.m. and started her day with a small bowl of cornflakes. It was a Monday morning, clear and sunny.

Brooke was looking forward to the weekend, despite a dentist's appointment on Friday when she'd have her wisdom teeth pulled. Her family planned to spend the rest of the weekend visiting and playing at her grandparents' house at Neskowin, on the beach. She also volunteered to help her mom, a third-grade teacher in Eugene, take the class on a field trip to OMSI in Portland.

But first, there were those light posts to clean.

She didn't enjoy cleaning those. And there were a lot of them at the apartment complex her sister and brother-in-law managed. Spiders hid in them. Brooke hated spiders.

But she took pride in her work. Recently, as she drove through the complex with her mom, Brooke pointed them out: "Look at that, Mom. Those are the cleanest light posts in Corvallis. I cleaned them myself."

Brooke packed her bag to stay in Corvallis for several days and pulled her blonde hair back in a ponytail so it wouldn't be in the way.

Her little sister, Jessica, was running late for school, and her mom had already left for work.

"Do you need me to drive you to school, Jess?" Brooke asked.

"No, I'll be fine," Jessica said. "Love you, Brooke."

"I love you too, Jess," Brooke said.

Around 8 a.m., Brooke loaded her backpack into her 1999 Ford Contour. Her brother-in-law liked to call it "The Blonde Car," a nod to its beige color. She drove up the valley from her Veneta home to Corvallis.

When she arrived half an hour later, she visited with her sister for a few minutes, then went out and got to work. Her sister left to drop off her children at preschool around 10.

When she returned at 10:30 a.m., Brooke was gone — vanished without a word or a trace.

A mother's fear

Cammy Wilberger, Brooke's mom, didn't get the word until after work that day, when she called Brooke to chat.

"I called Brooke's cell phone and her brother answered," she said. "So I chatted with him and he didn't say much. Finally, I said, ‘Is Brooke there?' and he said, ‘We can't find her.' "

"Spencer, don't tease me," she told him sternly.

"Mom, I'm not," he replied. "We can't find her."

Cammy knew something was horribly wrong.

"I still remember how my arms felt," she said. "My arms, everything in my body just drained out. I said, "I can't make it home. I gotta go," and hung up."

Cammy collected herself and made a phone call, this time to Jessica.

"Something's going on in Corvallis," she told her youngest daughter. "We need to have a bag packed. I'm coming home now. Be ready."

When Cammy got home, she grabbed Jessica and said, "Brooke's missing. We need to say a prayer."

She also called her friend Cheryl Blake, wife of the bishop of the family's ward at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and mother of Brooke's boyfriend. The Blakes mobilized the church.

Greg Wilberger, a chemical engineer who works with Borden Chemicals in Springfield designing facilities, was on his way to San Francisco on a business trip. The family reached him in the Portland International Airport with the news. He canceled his ticket, rented a car and drove straight to Corvallis — "I think I only saw three things the whole way," he said.

A parent's dream

Brooke Wilberger was born Feb. 20, 1985, in Fresno, Calif. When she was a month old, the family moved to La Grande and, four and a half years after that, to Veneta, as Greg got transferred from plant to plant at Borden. At the time, Cammy was a full-time mother — she stayed home with her kids until all of them were in school.

"When we lived in La Grande, Greg worked close to home — he'd come home for lunch and she'd wait at the window every day for Daddy," said Cammy.

In Veneta, Brooke attended Central Elementary School, just a few mailboxes away from the family's country home. She had a little trouble there, at first. Talking was something that didn't come easy.

"I took her brothers aside and said, ‘I don't care what you say or do, but never tease her about her speech,' " said Cammy. "And they never did."

After a few years, and with the help of a speech therapist in kindergarten, she got the hang of it, and words never really got in her way again.

"She's very animated when she talks," said Cammy. "She uses her hands. She even practiced hanging onto the side (of the chair, to reduce it). ... And she's really a good little writer. Her sophomore year, she got AP English student of the year."

She learned to play the piano, too, and after she got good at it, she really enjoyed it — although, Cammy says, recitals were something else.

"She really disliked recitals," said Cammy. "She'd get so stressed out over recitals."

Brooke loved horses, and when she was in the fourth grade, a neighbor rented a horse named Maggie and let her take care of it for a year. She was conscientious about taking care of the animal every day, mucking out the stalls and feeding the horse. The experience taught her that having a pony wasn't all fun.

"I think she got to ride it maybe two times that year," said Greg.

It wasn't just horses, either. Greg tells a story of a 4-H pig Brooke raised.

"The pig had a hernia, so it was excluded (from competition)," he said. "So we had to butcher it. But Brooke wasn't about to eat Chip."

To this day, Brooke doesn't care for pork.

A high-school standout

At Elmira High School, Brooke began to stand out. Although Cammy said she had to work hard for her grades, her grade-point average was almost a 4.0 — she got one B during her entire high-school career. She was also involved in student activities.

She was associated student body secretary and, with a classmate, spearheaded the "Mr. Falcon" fund-raising pageant for the Children's Miracle Network, raking in more than $20,000.

She played soccer and competed in track — mostly the long jump and relays, although Cammy said she'd run a 100-meter as well if asked to.

"She liked basketball when she was in middle school, but she stopped in high school," said Greg. "It interfered with skiing season."

Brooke's brothers-in-law, Zak Hansen and Jared Cordon, introduced her to snowboarding, and it quickly became one of her favorite family activities.

She decided to skip calculus and try something new — drama.

"She loved it," said Cammy. "They did a school play, (Gilbert and Sullivan's) ‘The Pirates of Penzance.' "

She acquired a reputation for being soft-spoken but tough and fearless, both on the soccer field and in the classroom. One time, in a U.S. history class, the teacher made a statement about the Mormon Trail that Brooke felt was false, and she spoke right up.

"She said, ‘I don't believe that, that's not the way it happened,' " said Cammy. "She just wanted to clarify a couple things she knew were wrong."

But she has a knack for diplomacy. Neither Cammy nor Greg could remember a time when anyone in the family got in a fight with her.

It was also in high school that Brooke met her boyfriend, Justin.

"The church has dances in Eugene, and when you're 14 you can go to the dances," said Cammy. "She'd come back and I'd say, ‘Okay, who'd you dance with today?' Pretty soon she started telling me about this boy named Justin Blake."

"The last couple years in high school, they did most things together," she said. "She really likes him. She's written to him every week."

On campus

When it came time to go to college, everyone in the family encouraged Brooke to go to Oregon State University. It was almost a family tradition — both her parents and all her brothers and sisters who'd gone to college went there. But she would hear none of it.

At BYU, she knew, she could get the training she'd needed to become a teacher and help other kids who had early-childhood speech problems.

"She wanted to do speech pathology," Greg said. "She hadn't talked to the professors to make that part of it yet, but she was taking signing classes."

She was also making plans to study abroad — in England, preferably, but as a second choice, at BYU's Hawaii campus.

Brooke also had a job — part of the deal Greg offered all the kids was that he would pay half of their college expenses. So she'd worked at the catering service on campus, driving a delivery truck and lifting boxes.

"I am so buff, Mom," Brooke told Cammy on one of her frequent phone calls. "That's where I gained my weight — it's all muscle."

She also told her mom about her success in learning to parallel park the big truck, and her first experience driving it in the snow — her employers didn't realize that it was her first time driving on icy roads.

"I think she had a very good relationship with the people she worked for, because they'd hired her to be a supervisor next year," said Cammy.

It wasn't all study and work in Brooke's freshman year.

"One time at BYU (Brooke and her friends) got water guns and went around squirting all the kids that were making out on campus," said Cammy.

Cammy thinks that it was inspired by the family's millennium party, when they all gathered at the Neskowin beach house and the kids ran all over the property playing Laser Tag.

An American girl

Brooke loves pizza, string cheese and a certain Subway sandwich.

"She likes that awful Subway sandwich with the bologna and stuff — cold cut combo, that's it," said Cammy. "She would eat that. ... We're pretty health conscious, really."

Brooke was also serious about personal security.

"Brooke is a cautious kid," said Cammy. "One of the concerns she had about her little car was that it did not have automatic locks. ... And she'd send us e-mails about self-defense."

"She'd taken a class, because there'd been some issues at BYU," said Greg.

"She isn't an airhead about safety," said Cammy.

Brooke is meticulous in managing her finances, Cammy said.

She also loves to shop — especially at the factory outlet stores in Lincoln City, while her dad sits in the car and reads.

"I do not shop," Greg said.

"She has more shoes than she needs," Cammy said.

When the young woman with all those shoes disappeared; only some cleaning equipment and two flip-flips were left behind.

Cammy said she and Greg know some people think there's no such kid as a Brooke Wilberger: Nobody's that good, they say.

"But in our minds, (someone like Brooke) is a regular kid," she added. "The sad truth is, that's not a regular kid in many homes."