Glenn Connelly / Photo Editor

A pile of unused decorations rests in the corner of a room in Reza Jou’s home in Houston, Texas. The room looks like a storage unit – a lamp, a collection of paintings, a bedspread and a rug.

But despite being full, the room feels empty. The lamp, the paintings, the bedspread and the rug should not still be in Texas. They were meant to adorn the walls of Reza Jou’s daughter Donna’s room at San Diego State.

“I was looking forward to going with her to decorate her room,” Reza Jou said. “These things are all just sitting in the corner now. I remember she was so excited.”

But Donna, a 19-year-old biology major at SDSU, never got the chance to show her father the room with the paintings hanging in just the right spot, the stained-glass lamp lighting a neatly folded bedspread and the rug covered with her books, clothes and CDs.

On the night of June 23, the 5-foot-3-inch, 110-pound student left her mother’s Rancho Santa Margarita residence wearing jeans, a gray tank top and a black zip-up hoodie. She climbed on the back of a motorcycle believed to have been driven by John Steven Burgess, a registered sex offender who turned 35 five days later.

But Donna did not know Burgess, at least as Burgess. She met him on Craigslist – where she had an ad posted for math tutoring – under the alias Sinjin Stevens, and the two exchanged messages and set up a meeting.

Later that night she began calling her friends from Burgess’ rented house. However, according to Detective Dan Salcedo of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, none of the phone calls were out of the ordinary.

“She made a number of phone calls, including one to her boyfriend,” Salcedo said. “The calls seemed social in nature, none of them appeared that she was in distress.”

The next morning at 6:08, her mother received a text message from Donna’s phone that read, “Battery’s dying. I’m in San Diego. Be home soon. I love you mommy.”

But when she missed work and school the following Monday, her family reported her missing and the search to find Donna Jou began.

Burgess fled to Jacksonville, Fla., where he was arrested on July 26 for possession of cocaine. On Aug. 17 he was extradited to Los Angeles, where he has since been released on bail pending a hearing.

“Oh no, what about you?”

Donna Jou graduated from high school with a 4.4 GPA and a 1570 on her SATs. At SDSU, she was on the Dean’s list, and her dream was to graduate in three years before going to medical school.

But she was hardly wrapped up in her own achievements. Donna was the kind of person who always put her needs last. She talked to her father on the phone for an hour each night. If her friends needed anything, she was always the first person they went to – and that’s exactly what she wanted.

“I used to tease her that she was too nice,” said Amina Gouda, one of Donna’s closest friends in San Diego. “She always wanted to know about me. I’d ask her about herself and she’d say, ‘Oh no, what about you?'”

But the overflowing kindness she exhibited while working as a volunteer at the battered women’s shelter or helping her friends with their problems wasn’t limited to her inner circle. According to friends and family, she was willing to help anyone.

“She was extremely smart, but as far as street smarts, not much,” Reza Jou said. “We used to warn her, ‘Donna there are bad people out there.’ She never believed us.”

Gouda last spoke with Donna on June 22. Donna of course made the conversation all about what Gouda was doing.

“She called to check up on me,” Gouda said. “I had been going through something, and she called to see if I was OK. We made plans to get together that Sunday, but she didn’t say anything about her plans. I wish she had.

“If she had told me she was meeting someone she met online, I would have told her not to. If she didn’t listen, I would have called her parents for her own safety.”

No end in sight

Every time the phone rings, Reza Jou jumps.

“When I get a call, I’m just hoping I’ll get some news about my daughter,” he said. “But she’s still missing. I feel like this is all a bad dream.”

But the NASA scientist struggles to sleep now. He and Donna were extremely close, even with about 1,500 miles between San Diego and Houston separating them.

“Every night we’d talk on the phone,” Reza Jou said. “I’d ask her about her day, what she had for dinner, how her homework was going, and then after about an hour she’d say goodnight and I could go to sleep.

“Now, I can’t sleep. I haven’t heard her voice for two and a half months. I’m still waiting for that call.”

As the months drag on and Donna’s still missing, everyone involved in the affair just wants to know what happened to their daughter, their friend, their sister. And it seems more and more obvious that the answer to that question rests with John Steven Burgess, a.k.a. Sinjin Stevens.

“The only person who knows what happened that night is Burgess,” Salcedo said. “He and only he can be the person who solves this. He fled 3,000 miles for a reason. He ought to come clean if for no other reason than to give the family closure.”

With tears welling in her eyes, Gouda echoes that sentiment.

“I’m so upset with how the situation is,” Gouda said. “There’s no closure. I still have that hope. I’ll be walking on campus and I’ll feel like I see her for a split second before I remember that she’s not here.”

Reza Jou remains hopeful that his daughter is still alive.

“I feel that she might be somewhere,” Jou said. “She might be sick, or drugged out, or hungry, or thirsty or just waiting for us,” he said. “That’s what we’re hoping for, praying for.”

If Donna is found, her father knows exactly what he’d do.

“I was supposed to take her to New York this summer,” Reza Jou said. “I promised her a trip anywhere in the world and that’s where she wanted to go. That really kills me. I feel like I still owe her that one.”

A father, a mother, a lamp, a rug, some paintings and a trip to New York. All waiting.