Russell Aumua Wright is one of the bouncers at Project 20/20, a bar in Ames, Iowa where Raven Gileau was the night she died. It was Wright’s birthday, and he’d invited one of her roommates, who had requested that Gileau be put on the guest list as well.
Wright said he was surprised at the request. He’s known Gileau since September 2009, and it didn’t seem in character for her to come out and party.
“Usually Raven doesn’t go out much like that,” Wright said. “[Raven’s roommate] had to remind me to put her on the guest list.”
Jie Chen, one of the two owners of Project 20/20, said they card everybody.
“Twenty-one and up get a wristband, 20 and under get a stamp,” Chen said.
Both Chen and Wright said they have never been in trouble with the law for serving minors before and are very careful to keep minors from drinking.
Wright said, when Gileau came out, he saw her in the club around 11 or 11:30 p.m. When she came to the club, he said, she got a stamp at the door, but he isn’t sure she ever got a purple wristband, indicating that she could get into the VIP area, which was cordoned off for the birthday party.
“When I encountered her the night of the party, she was totally cool,” Wright said. “We were talking, she gave me a big hug. She joked around about getting her money back because she paid to get she [and her roommate] in. She wasn’t wasted at all. She was cool.”
Almost every night that they are open, Project 20/20 is visited by the police.
“The police usually come into our bar and check [for compliance],” Chen said. “Usually right around 12:30.”
The police came in Saturday night, and Wright, who said he’s on friendly terms with the officers who come into the bar, said he was almost positive that Gileau was still in the bar when the police first came in. Instead of just checking and leaving like they normally do, Wright said the two officers who showed up stayed for a bit to look at all of the pictures he’d put up to celebrate his birthday.
“This time, they hung out,” Wright said. “There weren’t any problems, no minors drinking, no problems, everything was cool.”
It was somewhere in that period, he said, that Gileau’s friends said she was missing.
Ames police Cmmdr. Brennan said the department has reason to believe that Gileau had been drinking that night and left the bar after midnight, closer to bar close.
Wright said she left far earlier than bar close.
“It was maybe 20-40 minutes after I saw her that her roommates asked me, ‘Have you seen Raven? We didn’t see where she went.’ That’s the first time they asked me,” Wright said.
He said, throughout the night, her roommates approached him four or five times to ask if he’d seen Gileau.
“Honestly, I didn’t ask anybody else [if they’d seen her], because I thought [her roommates] had it under control,” Wright said. “I just thought, like, maybe she was just somewhere else in the club. But I guess they realized she wasn’t there. The last time that they asked me, it was, like, a frantic type of thing, because they were saying that they didn’t know where she was, and they were about to go.”
Brennan said Gileau’s roommates asked an officer in Campustown for assistance when they couldn’t find her.
While the exact timeline and details are still under investigation, at some point Gileau left the bar with a man whom Ames police describe as a friend.
“[The group] came to the bar together, and they were certainly going to practice the buddy system, but Raven decided she wanted to leave when she did,” Brennan said. “It was closer to bar closing [when] the group got separated.”
Wright didn’t remember there being anyone with Gileau except her female roommates when he saw her that evening.
“I don’t know if it was a miscommunication or what, but this young lady and her friend decided to walk home at that time,” Brennan said. “The friends that were left in the bar didn’t know where she was.”
Between the time Gileau left the bar and the time that her roommates communicated with her male companion, she had disappeared.
According to Ames police, Gileau and her companion walked up Hyland Avenue and turned onto 13th Street, presumably headed toward Frederikson Court, where Gileau is listed to have lived, according to the ISU directory. When Gileau said she couldn’t go on, her companion told her to stay underneath the Union Pacific railroad bridge that crosses over 13th Street, near Ontario Street, while he went to get his car. Upon arriving at his car, Brennan said, he discovered that he didn’t have his keys and had to take a bus to his roommate to get them. When he returned, Gileau was gone.
Brennan doesn’t know why the two walked that route.
“Is there a direct route from Campustown to Frederikson Court?” Brennan said. “The answer to that is that, if you’re a crow, there is. Realistically speaking, if you are walking or you’re driving, there is not a straight, direct route.”
After he returned to Gileau’s apartment and found she wasn’t there, he and Gileau’s roommates decided to call the police.
Gileau was reported missing at 3:19 a.m. Sunday morning.
At 5:15 a.m., Ames police contacted Union Pacific and asked them to stop train service through the area because they’d found Raven’s body, said Mark Davis, director of corporate relations and media for Union Pacific in Iowa.
Wright said his boss called him that morning to tell him about what had happened to Gileau.
“I got kind of emotional,” he said. “I mean, we’re both young, I’m 19, she’s 19, she’ll never know what it feels like to be married or have her own kids. I mean, it’s just, her life is over, and she can’t get it back. I wish I could do anything so that she could have her life back. I’d give my own life if she could have her life back.”