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Matt Smart is Kristen's younger brother. To you she was like a star. Well, yeah, she she was an artist. She
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was an adventurer.
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She was an individual who was just full of life. Get out there and get it done. She
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arrived at Cal Poly in the fall of 1995, excited to start college life. And the campus certainly seemed a safe place. You feel like you're in a kind of sheltered
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community because you know it's really kind of away from town. It was still hard for her
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little brother to say goodbye. It's like, so we just leave her here?
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of trust that you're putting
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in that. Trust that she'll make the right
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choices and that those around her will, particularly
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because at 18 or 19, college freshmen are just on the cusp of adulthood. For Kristen, that brought a time of reinvention. And she began going by other names
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like Roxy. What was the deal with her calling yourself Roxy?
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What was the deal with her calling herself Roxy?
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It was a nickname she gave herself. I think it was just kind of like this alter ego. She kind of just wanted to have fun and play with it. As much
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as Kristen was exploring her new independent self, her ties to home remain strong. She called you guys every Sunday?
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Kristen left a message on her parents answering machine the Friday of Memorial Day weekend. They weren't
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home. You know, you
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know your children's voice and there was so much laughter and levity in it that she was so happy that, you know, that's the last I heard from her.
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No call that Sunday. It
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was Tuesday, three
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days after she'd been last seen, that campus police took an official missing persons report. It was clear
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that they weren't really concerned. They still thought she could have been a runaway. They thought she could have just, you know, been out having fun.
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Soon Cal Poly was buzzing about the missing freshmen. And what happened at an off campus party? They didn't want him near her. I
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just didn't want him near her. I didn't like it. I didn't really want him near
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You had a bad feeling. Yeah.
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It is probably not terribly surprising that a search for a missing college student
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might lead investigators to a party.
