The parents of Sudiksha Konanki, the 20-year-old college student who went missing during a spring break trip to Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, said they had come to terms with the possibility she had drowned, and asked for privacy to mourn her, according to officials and a statement to the media on Tuesday.
Their statement came more than a week after her disappearance on March 6 grabbed headlines around the world, and led to repeated questioning of the last person seen with her.
“Sudiksha’s family has expressed their belief that she drowned,” the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office in Virginia said in a statement on Tuesday. “While a final decision to make such a declaration rests with authorities in the Dominican Republic, we will support the Konanki family in every way possible” while continuing to review the evidence, the office said.
The person last seen with her, an American man whom The New York Times is not naming because he has not been charged with a crime, attended a court hearing in the Dominican city of Higüey on Tuesday. He said during the hearing that he wanted to go home and to see his family, El Caribe, a local newspaper, reported. He said he had been held in the country for 10 days.
A judge at the hearing said he could move about freely in the Dominican Republic and without police supervision going forward. ABC News reported that the Dominican authorities had confiscated his passport. But Thomas A. Julia, a spokesman for the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office, said on Wednesday that investigators in the United States had been told that “he is free to come back to the United States.”
“He was never a suspect,” Mr. Julia said in an interview, adding that two Loudoun County detectives had interviewed him in the Dominican Republic on March 13 and “we believe he was fully cooperative.”
“From what we can tell,” Mr. Julia said, “he tried to get her out of the water.”
Ms. Konanki’s father told reporters that the family had accepted “that our daughter has drowned” and that this conclusion was “incredibly difficult for us to process,” according to a video posted online by Fox 5 DC.
The father said the authorities had described how high the waves were when Ms. Konanki disappeared. And the authorities, he said, had explained that the man who was last seen with her was never a suspect. Ms. Konanki’s mother sobbed as he read the statement. The family asked for “time and privacy to focus on healing,” NBC4 Washington reported.
Ms. Konanki, a University of Pittsburgh student from Loudoun County, had stayed at the Hotel Riu Republica in Punta Cana with five friends after arriving in the Dominican Republic on March 3, the police said. She was spotted in the early morning hours of March 6 near a beach in Punta Cana with the American man, according to the authorities in the Dominican Republic.
Surveillance video showed Ms. Konanki and the man with their arms around each other, walking toward the beach with a group of other young people, Noticias SIN, a Dominican news outlet, reported.
When the United States Embassy in the Dominican Republic alerted the police that Ms. Konanki had disappeared, officials began an exhaustive search of the beach and the surrounding area, using drones, helicopters, divers, boats, police dogs and other resources, the authorities said.
More than 300 agents have been searching for Ms. Konanki, the police said. The F.B.I. has been assisting in the investigation, according to the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office.
Hogla Enecia Pérez contributed reporting from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Michael Levenson and Amanda Holpuch also contributed reporting.
