KALAMAZOO, MI — Ask her parents and her sister to describe Dr. Teleka Patrick, the words will flow from their lips without hesitation.

She is beautiful and she is brilliant.

They talk of a daughter and a sister who graduated high school in New York City as a National Merit finalist with a scholarship offer from Harvard.

She was one class short of having two bachelor’s degrees when she finished her undergraduate studies at Oakwood University in Huntsville, Ala., and left medical school in California this past spring with her medical degree and a doctorate in biochemistry.

“She often says to me, ‘Tenesha, you’re smarter than me,’” Patrick’s sister, Tenesha Patrick, said recently. “I’m like, ‘What are you talking about.’ Not only is she brilliant, she’s extremely hard working.

“… Whatever she approaches, she puts her all into it.”

It’s that type of promise that has defined Patrick, 30, throughout her life, Tenesha Patrick and her parents, Mattahais and Irene Patrick, say.

It’s also the reason why they and police are baffled by her Dec. 5 disappearance.

With 13 years of schooling behind her in pursuit of her dream of being a doctor in child psychiatry, Patrick was in her first year as a medical resident with the WMU School of Medicine.

But for the last 17 days now, Patrick has been in the wind, vanished, an almost ghostly figure that, for now, her parents can see only on missing posters and surveillance camera footage.

“We’re pretty baffled by the whole thing,” Indiana State Police Sgt. Rick Strong said. “We’re just as frustrated as the family.

The disappearance

The details — the how more than the why — of Patrick’s disappearance have slowly trickled out from police and her family since she was last seen in downtown Kalamazoo on Dec. 5

What is known, at this point, is Patrick worked a shift at Borgess Medical Center that night and left without her purse and cellphone, catching a ride from the hospital from a fellow medical resident.

She was dropped off in front of the Radisson Plaza Hotel & Suites at 7:34 p.m.

Surveillance footage released Thursday by the hotel shows the friend depart the hotel as Patrick walks up to the Radisson, bound for the hotel’s front desk.

She has cash in hand as she tries to get a room, talking to a concierge for about 14 minutes before — at about 7:53 p.m. — a hotel courtesy shuttle driver gave her a ride back to the Borgess parking lot where, presumably, Patrick walked to her gold 1997 Lexus ES300 that was parked at the facility.

What isn’t known, at least publicly, is why Patrick went to the Radisson on Dec. 5 to begin with instead of just heading home from Borgess to her apartment at Gull Run Apartments, a mere three miles from the hospital.

Not to mention, she got a ride to the hotel from Borgess when her own car was in the hospital’s parking lot and she left work that night without her purse or cellphone.

“These are some of the mysteries that we don’t understand,” Mattahais Patrick said.

Indiana State Police involvement in Patrick’s case would come later on the night of Dec. 5 when her Lexus was found at about 10:20 p.m. in a ditch off of westbound I-94 near Portage, Ind.

A trooper responded to the highway near the Porter/Burns Harbor exit after a motorist reported that a car matching the description of Patrick’s Lexus was driving erratically on the highway.

At the scene, Patrick and the keys to the car were nowhere to be found. The trooper found personal belongings in Patrick’s car but no signs of anything suspicious.

State police have said they can’t say with certainty whether Patrick was driving the Lexus on I-94 that night. The motorist who called to report the car was driving erratically reported at least one person was in the vehicle.

Investigators in Kalamazoo didn’t learn of Patrick’s car being in Indiana until Dec. 10 when they did a computer search and discovered the Lexus had been impounded in Indiana.

Investigators have said a bloodhound used Dec. 12 to retrace Patrick’s steps from the scene of where her car was found tracked from the Lexus right up to I-94, leading police and her parents to consider that Patrick may have been picked up by another motorist.

Full of promise

For now, Patrick’s family waits.

Her parents, who reside in Florida, and her sister, who lives in Cambridge, Mass., have set up in a Kalamazoo hotel with no plans to leave anytime soon.

The family has hired a private investigator and they’ve done their own searches for Patrick in Kalamazoo and Indiana, passing out fliers and taking to Twitter and Facebook with pleas for help finding Patrick.

“Teleka is a light,” Irene Patrick said. “A happy, spirited person. She’s kind and compassionate.”

While Patrick remains missing, her family’s efforts have not been in vain. Her disappearance is being followed heavily on Twitter and Facebook, and CNN, ABC and the Nancy Grace Show on CNN Headline News have aired segments about the case.

Irene Patrick said the last time she spoke to her daughter was by phone on Dec. 1, as Patrick was on her way back to Kalamazoo from spending the weekend with family in Chicago for Thanksgiving.

All she wants now, Irene Patrick says, is her daughter home for Christmas.

Her father speaks of all the promise his daughter’s life holds. He wants her home to, back to work and making the contribution to society that she desired to when she decided as a child that she wanted to be a doctor.

Mattahais and Irene say their daughter’s plans as a child to become a doctor were rooted in a simple desire — she wanted to help people, “especially the less fortunate.”

In high school, her hopes of pursuing medical research were fueled when she worked on a project for a research competition alongside a doctor from Queens College.

She left Queens, where she was born and raised, in 2000 to attend Oakwood University in Huntsville, Ala.. In doing so, she turned down an offer to attend Harvard, opting for Oakwood, which her parents said has a strong pre-med program, and Huntsville, a city with a large Seventh-day Adventist community.

Patrick’s father is a retired Seventh-day Adventist minister who attended seminary in Berrien Springs.

Her parents said Patrick left Huntsville four years later with a bachelor’s degree in theology and was one class short of obtaining a bachelor’s degree in biology.

For the next nine years, she called Loma Linda, Calif., home where she attended the Loma Linda University School of Medicine on a scholarship.

It was there that her passion for child psychiatry grew and also where she met her husband, who she was married to for four years before the couple divorced in 2011, Patrick’s family said.

Tenesha Patrick said her sister’s interest in child psychiatry was fueled during her sister’s time with her ex-husband, who had a young son with autism.

“He was non-verbal,” Tenesha Patrick said of the boy. “She just saw there would be times when he would be trying to communicate and watching the ways he would try to get his message across.

“She was just really interested about what was happening in the mind and in that process.”

Patrick graduated from Loma Linda this past spring and came to Kalamazoo in July to begin the first of four years as a medical resident in psychiatry with the Western Michigan University School of Medicine.

Patrick’s decision to come to Kalamazoo surprised her parents. Irene Patrick said her daughter had other schools to choose from, including Harvard and Yale. Mattahais Patrick said he and his wife didn’t know there was a medical residency program in Kalamazoo until his daughter came here this past summer.

Irene Patrick said she wished her daughter had gone to a program where she could have lived closer to family.

“I was disappointed because she knew no one here,” Irene Patrick said.

However, once Patrick arrived and began her work as a doctor, her parents and sister said Patrick told them she liked Kalamazoo.

“When she came here, she was like, ‘I like the people … they’re laid back, they know their stuff,’” Tenesha Patrick recalled. “That’s what she was looking for in a program … When she came here she really felt that sense of respect and acceptance and it was a place where she could see herself growing as a doctor.”

And there were other indications that Patrick was finding her place in Kalamazoo.

Dorene Gardner, an associate minister at Mt. Zion Baptist Church, first met Patrick Nov. 27 during a prayer service at the Roberson Street church.

Gardner said Patrick “gave a really powerful testimony” during the service about her life and her journey through medical school “and how she really felt God had blessed her on that journey.”

Gardner and Patrick spoke that night and Gardner invited Patrick to her home for Thanksgiving dinner on Nov. 28. It was at that dinner that Gardner said Patrick spoke at length with Gardner’s daughter, who is in a doctoral program at WMU.

“We had a really good time and fellowship,” Gardner said. “They shared a lot of things and challenges and opportunities … What we saw and what we experienced that day with her was a really bright and intelligent, and beautiful woman.”

Now, 24 days since she sat with Gardner and her family that Thanksgiving night, and three weeks since she last spoke to her mother, Patrick’s family is prayerful and hopeful they’ll have her home for Christmas.

Irene Patrick spoke this week of how her daughter had already purchased a plane ticket to be with her parents in Florida from Dec. 23-30.

“We want her home with us,” Irene Patrick said. “We want everyone to have this picture etched in their minds of this lovely girl and her parents whose hearts are breaking.

“Our hearts just ache for her.”

Rex Hall Jr. is a public safety reporter for the Kalamazoo Gazette. You can reach him at rhall2@mlive.com. Follow him on Twitter.

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