Missing Student Mickey Shunick's Bike Found: Serial Predator Responsible for Abduction? (VIDEO)
Missing college student Mickey Shunick is feared injured after her damaged bike was found by authorities 27 miles away from her last known location. Now police are looking for the drivers of vehicles captured by surveillance video footage; calling them vehicles of interest.
"The vehicles we're looking for are just vehicles of interest, not necessarily suspects," ABC News consultant Brad Garrett told the agency. "We know those vehicles were in the area and in the immediate area."
The three vehicles in question include a white pickup truck, a four-door Chevy and an older model sedan.
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Police believe the drivers could provide valuable information about Shunick's whereabouts or what they saw on the day she went missing. She was last seen at a friend's house in Louisiana 11 days ago, riding her bike home early in the morning. Now that the bike has been located, police fear she could be injured.
"If her bike was hit by a vehicle, you may be able to tell from the damage whether it was intentional or not," Garrett explained. "There could be a wealth of information potentially gathered in addition to the location of the bike."
"We strongly believe that the person, or perpetrator, drove down to the edge of the water and dumped the bike into the water for it not to be found," Paul Mouton of the Lafayette Police Department told ABC.
The evidence raises the possibility that a serial predator is responsible for Shunick's disappearance. Two months ago, Tasha Patterson, a girl from the same area as Shunick, claimed that a man in a white pickup truck picked her up as she rode her bike home. Patterson was on her bike around the same time as Shunick, approximately 2:00 a.m., when a man in the truck pulled alongside and offered her a ride.
He propositioned Patterson, but she refused. "He rides around town all the time trying to pick up pretty girls," she told the Daily Mail.
Patterson's story sounds similar to that of Shunick's and could prove useful if, in fact, the same man is responsible for Shunick's abduction.
"Someone was in that immediate area when she passed on the bike," Mouton has reported. "So it's trying to identify with those people and getting that information back so we can hopefully get closer to finding her. We know she got as far as St. Landry Street and that there was a white pickup truck in that area."
"I think a lot of different things could have happened: someone made a mistake, hit her, picked her up or something and then they freaked out and have her somewhere," Shunick's sister Charlene told KATC-TV.
"We didn't get the bad feeling in the pit of our stomachs like 'Oh my God, this is terrible,'" she said of the bike's discovery.
"It was more like, 'Oh my God, finally we found something of Mickey's.' And we realized that someone definitely took her and this was planned out… whoever has her is thinking about these things."
A $25,000 reward has been offered to anyone with any information leading to Shunick's return.
Watch the police briefing BELOW:
