As an international search for missing University of Pittsburgh student Sudiksha Konanki presses on, her family has asked Dominican Republic authorities to pronounce the 20-year-old dead, according to a news report.
Konanki vanished from Punta Cana earlier this month while on a spring break trip with friends. She was last seen on March 6, and the person believed to last see her alive told investigators she had struggled in the ocean before disappearing.
Her family, who live in Loudoun County, Virginia, sent a letter to Dominican authorities asking that she be declared dead, Dominican Republic National Police spokesperson Diego Pesqueira said, according to a report from NBC News on Monday.
Authorities in the Dominican Republic and the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office, also involved in the investigation, did not immediately respond to inquiries from USA TODAY on Tuesday.
More: Interpol issues global alert in search for missing college student Sudiksha Konanki
Konanki arrived in the country on March 3. During the early morning hours on March 6, surveillance footage shows Konanki drinking with a group in the lobby at the Riu Republica hotel, where she was staying. The footage showed her with a man identified as Joshua Riibe, a student at a Minnesota university she met while on the trip, while the rest of the group walked toward the beach.
Riibe told investigators that he and Konanki went into the ocean together and a large wave dragged them away from shore. According to a transcript of his interview with police obtained by U.S. and Dominican news outlets, Riibe said he carried Konanki back to shallower water and saw her walk knee-high in the direction she had left her clothes, before he vomited and later passed out. He said he thought she had taken her clothes and left, but he did not see her again.
Riibe has been considered a person of interest, not a suspect, in Konanki’s disappearance, according to the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office. Officials seized his passport and have held him under surveillance at the hotel since she went missing, according to news reports.
More: Last man to see Sudiksha Konanki said he tried to save missing student from ocean: Reports
Konanki’s father, Subbarayudu Konanki, previously urged authorities to expand the search beyond the water after her body wasn’t found in an initial search of the ocean. He asked them to consider options other than drowning, including kidnapping.
In the letter to Dominican police from Konanki’s parents, which was also obtained by Fox News, they wrote that initiating the process of declaring her dead would not ease their grief but would “bring some closure and enable us to honor her memory.”
