NH MUNICIPAL POLICE
DEPARTMENT OF MISSING PERSONS
WY8-5-20-5-12-12-19-20-8-5-20-18-21-20-8
FOLLOW-UP INTERVIEW WITH ARJUN ENGELEJES
Tape 1 Side 1 of 1
Det. Garcia:
Follow-up statement from Arjun Engelejes. The date is March 17th, 2016, and the time is 11:41am. The statement is taking place at the New Haven Municipal Police Headquarters. Those present are myself, Detective Andrea Garcia, Assistant Detective Marcus Smith, and Arjun Engelejes.
Engelejes:
Thanks for meeting me.
Det. Garcia:
Of course. You feeling better since last time?
Engelejes:
Yeah.
Det. Garcia:
Okay. Remember, you don’t have to talk about anything you don’t feel ready to yet, okay? Just let me know.
Engelejes:
Yup. Thanks, officer.
Det. Garcia:
Okay. Whenever you’re ready, could you spell your first name?
Engelejes:
Arjun. A-R-J-U-N.
Det. Garcia:
And your last name?
Engelejes:
E-N-G-E-L-E-J-E-S.
Det. Garcia:
Thanks. Could you state, for the recording, the purpose of this
conversation?
Engelejes:
Yeah, I’d like to make a statement about events, uh, events around my sister’s disappearance and my, like, concussion.
Det. Garcia:
Do you consent to the recording of this conversation on tape?
Engelejes:
Yes, I’m fine with that.
Det. Garcia:
Could you state your agreement and acknowledgement of the Notice and Waiver of Rights?
Engelejes:
Yes, I signed and agree to the waiver.
Det. Garcia:
And you did that freely of your own will and will power?
Engelejes:
Yes.
Det. Garcia:
Any questions or confusion regarding that document?
Engelejes:
No.
Det. Garcia:
And the form is in front of you and signed by me, Detective Garcia, Assistant Detective Smith, and yourself?
Engelejes:
That's correct.
Det. Garcia:
Okay. Whenever you’re ready, you can begin describing the events where you left off in our last conversation.
Engelejes:
Okay. So I go to UCLA, so I took a flight over to see my parents to help look for my sister, Tatiana Engelejes.
Det. Garcia:
Could you describe your last communication with Tatiana?
Engelejes:
Last thing we talked about was this Fallout 4 meme. It’s a video game. Not great, but the visuals are nice. Uh, we aren’t like super close — not in a we hate each other kind of way, more so our interests are really different.
Det. Garcia:
What do you mean?
Engelejes:
I’m too much of a nerd for her, and my music taste is too mainstream.
She’s into, like, “bandoms,” fandoms for singers and bands and stuff? I don’t care about music that much. I guess I listen to anime soundtracks and some Eurobeat, which she thinks is trash. And also isn’t it weird to be a fan of a real life group of people? So we don’t have much to talk about.
For the past couple of years, uh, she’s been in a teen angst sort of phase, you know, where she mostly holes up in her, like, room and goes through social media, right? She doesn’t really game. Music, she makes music sometimes. But mostly she’s always talking to her friends at 4 AM or whatever. When I come back for holidays, I have to stay in my old bedroom. My parents have converted it to storage mostly, hahaha, but I survive. But yeah my room, which shares a wall with her bedroom.
There’s been like a time or two, uh, when I thought I heard another, uh, voice in her room with her, but never, I never hear her talk out loud to anyone. Sometimes she, she sometimes plays music really loudly.
Det. Garcia:
Could you describe the other voice you heard?
Engelejes:
Yeah, the voice is like, I don’t know if they were physically there, but definitely another teenager, I think. I know it’s not her voice, deeper, it’s definitely deeper. But I was like, if she’s got a boy sneaking in through her window, I just thought like bruh, that shit’s not my business. Good for her, you know?
Det. Garcia:
What did you do once you returned home?
Engelejes:
Well, my parents and I did a sweep around the house and the little bit of backyard we’ve got to see if there’s anywhere she could’ve gone. There weren’t any signs of her leaving. Her window seemed untouched and stuff. She can’t drive. Thank god. But the car was still there so we know she hadn’t tried either.
Det. Garcia:
How did you know her window was untouched?
Engelejes:
Oh, well, I mean untouched like it had dust collecting on the windowsill and handle and everything. And outside, there were no footprints though it had kind of recently rained.
Det. Garcia:
Was there anything else in her room?
Engelejes:
A pile of laundry, some math homework on her desk due Monday that she apparently never got to, and her laptop on her bed.
Det. Garcia:
Was there anything strange about her room?
Engelejes:
I guess the only interesting thing was her blankets and pillow were arranged in such a way that it seems like she slipped out, out from under the blankets without disturbing any of it. If that makes sense. She stacks up her pillows to sit on her bed, two pillows, and the pillows were creased in where she had been sitting, like bent, bent in the middle kind of, and the blankets were bundled up close to the pillow with the laptop on top of them. I don’t know why this was weird to me, I guess I just thought you’d move your laptop to the side and like, have to crawl out of your blankets to leave your bed and go, right? And, well, that was kind of it.
Det. Garcia:
Okay. What happened after you and your parents checked the room and
backyard?
Engelejes:
For dinner my parents made her favorite paneer tikka masala and ordered pizza from Sally’s and my mom opened the windows as we ate so the smell would spread outwards, I guess. Which, I mean, she’s not a lost dog, you know? But uh, it helped them feel like they were doing something, I guess. I was really tired because I got zero sleep on my red eye, yeah stupid I know, so I went to my room, uh, to take a nap. I turned off all the lights and drew, like, drew my curtains, right, and I swear I did, but it still wasn’t completely dark. There was something…stuck in the, uh, wall, I guess? Like the wall was glowing. Glowing, something was glowing from inside it, the wall. I figured maybe one of Tati’s strings of fairy lights, like, fell in from the other side or something. I think that’s happened before, our house, it isn’t always structurally the soundest. So I go into Tati’s room,
right.
Everything in Tati’s room was…like, it was…facing out. I don’t know how else to describe it. Like maybe I thought maybe one of my parents had gone upstairs at some point and cleaned the room but they had turned everything outwards. Facing the door. Her books weren’t tucked in with the spines showing, they were lined up flat against the back of the shelf so I could see all their covers. All her stuffed animals were facing the door too. Her lamp had been turned, uh, so the main pattern on the fabric showed. And, oh, and I almost had a fucking heart attack, right, because for a moment I thought there was a crowd of people standing in there facing me, but, yeah, but it was just that someone had moved the laundry.
Yeah, and hung a sweater on each bedpost and each knob of her closet with all the sleeves spread out to dry, but it scared the shit out of me. And her laptop, on the bed, her laptop was open and facing me. That was the thing that was glowing. I swear it wasn’t on during the day. The thing that was open on her laptop was her Discord.
Det. Garcia:
What’s Discord?
Engelejes:
Oh, it’s a kind of, it’s this messaging app? When you’re playing, like, WOW or Doom or whatever and the in-game comms suck you can keep Discord open at the same time and strategize and shit. But you don’t have to talk out loud on it I guess. It’s good for lots of things. You can have individual messages and also join servers, like fan communities or big groups with different text and voice channels and stuff. I guess it’s like…really big…Google Plus…where each community…is a server?
Det. Garcia:
Sorry, I don’t think I follow.
Engelejes:
Okay, just like a place you can talk to people, by which I mean text them, by which I mean message them one on one, like, privately, or you can talk to, you can talk to a lot of people at once. Okay? So she had a ton of unread messages in her direct messages. Like a thousand something. But the thing that was open on the screen was this, like, this server. It was called “Here.” And it was completely empty. Like she was the only user in it, and I don’t think, uh, I mean, she had never talked in it. I clicked around a couple of the channels but they were all the same. A channel name, no messages, her account as the only user.
I guess I felt like I’d get in trouble if I, uh, poked into her private stuff too much when she got back. Once I found her watching this animated stuff, this animated, like, porn thing with Tom Hiddleston, he’s like the actor for Loki from Marvel. And she almost killed me and my parents cussed me out because she was mad at me. So I didn’t wanna rifle through her junk, I wanted to go downstairs and get my parents. But then I turned around and
my eyes, uh, kinda readjusted to the darkness, and I realized everything had moved. I didn’t really hear anything move, but I guess I was too absorbed in looking at the computer to see? But the sweaters, the closet doors had inched open a bit so the sweaters were facing me, and the books on the shelf were now all at these diagonals, uh, so the covers were facing me instead of the door. It was clearest in the stuffed animals because they, like, face you. Tati has a bunch around the room and the pile in the corner had definitely turned. But there was also one on the bed, it’s like a little lamb thing from Walmart that recites Bible verses, and looking at the lamb I realized everything hadn’t moved to point at me. Everything had moved to point at the laptop. Okay, this part is a bit…I’m sorry. I don’t remember it too clearly.
Det. Garcia:
did you know heaven is r e a l
Engelejes:
Yeah. Thanks.
Det. Garcia:
do you feel a l o n e
Engelejes:
Okay. What I remember is looking back down at the laptop and…it was changing. The glass, uh, stretching out towards me. Like when rendering glitches and someone’s face explodes? But like slowly, like it was melting, but horizontal? Uh, like the letters on the screen were trying to push out of there. It looked sharp, sharp and painful, but for some reason my instinct was to touch it. To push it back into place, I guess? So, and so when I reached my hand towards the screen, I felt this kind of pull. Like when you vacuum the corner of a rug? And I swear, this sounds weird but I swear the glass was starting to fold in, like fold in around it. And then I don’t really know, I think I panicked and bonked my head on something above her bed? But next thing I knew I had fallen on my ass, kinda like two feet from the bed, I guess, and it was completely dark and my head hurt like shit.
Det. Garcia:
like nobody will ever just l i s t en to you
Engelejes:
Bruh. No. I’ve never had a concussion before, and it sucks. I’m mostly kinda staying at home. My parents told me they hadn’t touched the room that night, and the next time I went to see it, it just looked like the way it did during the day. They haven’t been able to get into her laptop — the Apple store said it overheated and died, maybe from being charged for too long or something.
Det. Garcia:
well
Engelejes:
Yeah, I told them. My parents think I had some kind of sleep paralysis sleepwalking thing going on, which makes sense. I used to get this, like, sleep paralysis stuff as a kid. But I’m doing better now.
Det. Garcia:
what if your life was y o u r s to create ?
Engelejes:
Ah, recovery is hard. The no screen time sucks the most I guess, but my university’s being nice about it and I’ll have time over spring break to catch up, to catch up on my work. I’ve had to phone call my friends, old school style, hahaha. But thanks for letting me talk to you about it.
Det. Garcia:
can’t wait to see you all here soon
Engelejes:
It’s the fucking trippiest thing that’s ever happened to me, dude, hahahaha. Yeah. I hope it’s kinda helpful at least.
