Math professor still missing

“It’s really a mystery,” said Dr. Loren Zimmerman, a CSC criminal justice professor who has taken a special interest in the case and has been working with law enforcement officers almost nonstop since the missing persons report was filed.

“He’s just not around, but we don’t know how he could have left town,” Zimmerman added Monday night. “He might be right under our noses someplace, but we can’t figure out where that would be.”

Haataja is described as 46 years old, white, six-foot-four-inches tall and about 230 pounds. He wears round glasses with thick lens, has graying brown hair and a receding hairline.

Haataja joined the CSC faculty this fall after spending the past six years working on his doctorate and serving as a teaching assistant at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He lived the first 10 years of his life in the Twin Cities of Minnesota before his family moved to Spearfish, S.D. He graduated Summa Cum Laude from Black Hills State in 1985.

Haataja earned a master’s degree from UNL in 1987 and was a teaching assistant there until 1991. During the next two years, he taught math at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, S.D.

He spent the next 6 ½ years working in technical support and training for a Sioux Falls computer firm before beginning work on his doctorate.

Zimmerman, who has nearly 30 years experiences in law enforcement, including 19 as a Los Angeles policeman who investigated murder cases, said Haataja’s car does not run and the bicycle that he sometimes rode was found in his apartment after initially being overlooked. When he went out of town, Haataja rented a vehicle, but no one in Chadron who rents them had him as a customer recently.

A bachelor who lives alone, Haataja has walked to and from work from his apartment at Second and Bordeaux Streets. Zimmerman said he has walked all the likely routes that Haataja would take, including the alleys, three times in the past week.

Others also have retraced the likely routes.

Zimmerman also organized two searches of the pine-clad hills to the south of the campus last week and he and his son walked them again Sunday. He also asked Haataja’s colleagues in the Math and Science Building at CSC to look in every closet and other out-of-the-way locations in the structure.

“We don’t think he’d do very well in the hills because he had five hours of surgery after breaking his hips in an ice skating accident in March 2005,” Zimmerman said. “He didn’t take anything with him that people usually take when they’re planning to leave town. And people who commit suicide may do it in an out-of-the-way place, but not where they will never be found again.”

Zimmerman noted that he’s had long telephone conversations with Haataja’s sister, Sharon Taylor, who lives in Rapid City, and his best friend, Tim Sorenson, a math professor at Augustana College.

“Both of them said that if he were alive and knew we were looking for him, he’d respond,” Zimmerman stated. “They said he wouldn’t want to put anybody out.”

Haataja’s sister has come to Chadron to help with the investigation.

“Naturally, she’s very concerned. It’s a huge dilemma,” Zimmerman said.

Zimmerman said Haataja apparently was last seen about 4:30 p.m. on Monday, Dec. 4. He was initially reported missing when he failed to show up for an appointment shortly after 6 p.m. Officials in the CSC Computer Center have determined that he signed on to the system about 11:30 that night, but don’t know from where that occurred. Although Haataja had three laptop computers in his apartment, he did not have Internet service there.

The apartment also contains approximately 1,000 books, Zimmerman said. Both Haataja’s sister and friend told Zimmerman it was not unusual for him to buy four to six volumes each time he visited a book store.

Law enforcement officers have changed the locks on Haataja’s apartment so he couldn’t be hiding someplace and returning to the apartment at inconspicuous times.

In the past, Zimmerman said Haataja had used antidepressant medication, but reportedly had “weaned himself” from them after getting the job at CSC this fall. He also apparently had tried to lose weight, giving up drinking Mountain Dew and turning to Slim-Fast, ramen soups and yogurt.

Ironically, Zimmerman’s involvement in the search coincides with three mock murder case scenarios that he gave his students in Forensics Sciences II course as a final assignment for the semester. More than 25 members of the campus community volunteered to take part in the cases, but not Haataja.

Searching for the missing professor has taken precedent for Zimmerman, of course.

“Things like this happen in the big cities, but not in places like Chadron,” Zimmerman noted. “It’s got me baffled. But he’s a human being and we have to keep searching for him.”