Steven Chait, a 20-year-old Columbia University student, was last seen leaving his dorm room at Furnald Hall in Manhattan on March 13, 1972. His roommate said Steven had been lying in bed listening to music, got up, said goodbye and left with no indication he would be gone long. Two days later friends alerted the family after he missed classes and shifts at Mama Joy’s Delicatessen. He left behind personal effects including books, his passport and uncashed paychecks.

Family described him as serious and studious; he had recently switched majors from engineering to art history after a poor grade and had appeared moody to his mother. He was active in the Columbia track team, the Sierra Club, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and had been intellectually precocious from a young age. For 25 years after the disappearance his mother received silent phone calls she believed were from him; they began on Mother’s Day 1972 and stopped in 1997.

The family remained deeply concerned while the initial police response treated him as an adult free to leave. His mother has said she feared he may have taken his own life but also held out hope he was alive. A track scholarship at Columbia was later established in his memory.