By Logan Jaspers, April 12 2023—
Despite almost four months of searching for the lost student, Dylan Paradowski hasn’t been able to return home thus far. He is believed to still be aimlessly roaming the Schulich School of Engineering.
Paradowski, a second-year law and society major who on Dec. 15, 2022, went to ENA 201 for a final exam. Many other students in attendance attest to the fact that Paradowski was in attendance for the exam. One student, Alice Delahaye, was sitting next to him.
When asked if Paradowski was acting unusually before the exam, Delahaye said he wasn’t.
“I mean, I don’t really know much about him, he seemed pretty normal,” she said. “He got to the exam with his pencil, calculator and eraser ahead of time, quietly sat down, did the exam and left. He finished and was out of the room about 20 minutes before I was. I haven’t seen him since.”
Security camera footage obtained by the Gauntlet shows Paradowski leaving ENA 201 that afternoon and walking through multiple hallways. After half an hour of walking, Paradowski ended up back where he started, seemingly causing his demeanour to change as he realized that he was lost. Panic-stricken, Paradowski frantically runs across all seven blocks in the complex before collapsing from exhaustion. The footage ends there.
Paradowski’s roommate, Robby Monet, said that Paradowski never returned to the dorm.
“He had told me the evening before the exam that he’d never been in Schulich, to which I jokingly responded with, ‘it’s like a labyrinth — you could easily get lost.’”
Monet’s face turned to a frown as he remarked, “I had no idea how right I was.”
Paradowski’s disappearance sparked a grassroots campaign, which has included large posters of his face with large text reading “HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN?” plastered all over the complex. The campaign has even organized expeditions into the engineering building to find him, but to no avail, as few are bold enough to brave Schulich’s innumerable depths.
However, not all hope is lost, as one student, who has asked to remain anonymous, revealed that they saw Paradowski just days ago.
“I was hanging out in Block A, doing my homework, when I saw this one guy playing on one of the pinball machines. He was really unkempt and had an impressively shaggy beard, but I could tell after a solid look that it was him. But, I blinked and he vanished — like he wasn’t there.”
With exams once again imminent, the university has asked students to pack a flashlight, a map of the building and some spare change so they can use the vending machines if they get hungry while lost, rather than make the engineering building more navigable.
Any sightings of Paradowski should be reported immediately to the authorities.
This article is part of our humour section.
