I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t want to hear the sound of the telephone ringing as I saton the couch, eyes closed, praying hard. I was hoping that instead, it would be the doorbell to his house to ring, so that his parents and sisters could open the door to reveal his smiling face with his usual antics. Just as he stepped into the room, everyone’s day would get a little brighter.

With hope, we waited and waited and waited for the doorbell that never rang. Instead, it was the dreaded telephone that rang, which I hoped was to tell us that this whole nightmare was finally over.

Pravin Varughese was only 19 years old when he went missing from SIU in Carbondale. A long time family friend, he was like a brother to all of us. When the blaring poster that reported he was missing popped up on my computer screen, I couldn’t believe my eyes.

“This has to be some kind of joke, right?” I asked my mom.
“No, I don’t think it is,” she replied, fear immediately rushing to her eyes. That was the day all of our lives got flipped upside down for the worse. Life was trying to throw us all to the ground, and we did our best to fight it.
From that moment on, all of Pravin’s family and friends worked tirelessly, doing everything and anything to get him back. Everyday, I would come home from school to ask my parents the same question, and everyday, I would get the same response. “Did they find any information about him yet?” I would ask, with a sense of optimismechoing in every word.

“Nope, nothing yet,” they would reply, a fraction of hope noticeable in their voices to keep my spirits up. However, as I kept asking them, that fraction of hope began to disappear.

For almost one week, the longest week of our lives, we spread the word and hoped that somehow and sometime soon, news of his safety and return would reach us. But unfortunately, it never did. On February 18, I came home from school to see my mom in tears, and I finally received the heartbreaking news. Pravin was found, but unfortunately, not alive.

In the blistering cold weather of a wooded area in Carbondale, our dear Pravin wasfound, and no one knew what happened to him. The only information we got was that, the night he went missing, he got a ride from an “acquaintance,” and never got back home.

Why didn’t we know anymore? Why did the police trooper that stopped the car of the“acquaintance” not search the woods that night when he knew something was going on? Whydid the autopsy reports blame this all on hypothermia when it was obvious that some type of foul play was involved? No one had any answers to my questions. But we intended to find them. Contrary to what we were initially made to believe about the hypothermia theory, the second autopsy proved that there were bruises all over his body, and therefore, showed us that there was foul play, and there was much more to the story than we thought.

Yet, after all the evidence and information we gave to the Carbondale police, they werestill covering up the obvious. We were being denied justice. Pravin was being denied justice.

“Unlike you, I am an American. I have rights,” Pravin once said to a friend.
His friend later told Pravin’s mom about their conversation. “How ironic is it that my Pravin thought he has rights, but gosh, he has no rights! Twentythree months later, we are still waiting for answers,” she replied to him.

Justice is a moral principle, a principle by which all people should be living. But unfortunately, a lot of people don’t. It seems to be so difficult to stand up for the prejudice that happens in our lives, but it shouldn’t be. We need to stand up for what we believe and for the people we love. That is what I learned from this tragic experience that brought so many of my family and friends down. But that’s not all it did. It also brought thousands of people all over the country together to fight for the cause. We may have been emotionally crushed inside, but that does not mean it is going to let us stop doing something about it. Nothing we do is going to bring back Pravin, but we can make sure no one else has to go through what we did.

Will we ever find out what really happened to Pravin that night? I don’t know. But there is one thing I know for sure.

Justice, it will be found.
 

Christin Philip, Grade 9, Chicago