At Graduation, Parents Learn Son Took Funds, Not Classes

For four years, Brad Wagner told his parents that college was going well, and they gave him money for tuition and rent. He talked to his roommates about his engineering classes and homework. He told them he had a job lined up after graduation as a chemical engineer in Charlotte, N.C.

But when Wagner’s parents came to Virginia Tech for his graduation, he was nowhere to be found. What’s more, they learned he had not been a student at the Blacksburg school since 1993.

Monday, the Wagners reported his disappearance to police.

“We’d just like Brad to call home. No matter what the problem, anything can be worked out,” his father, John Wagner, said Friday from his home in Bristol, Va.

Wagner said he last spoke with his son May 10, the day before the graduation ceremony. They planned to meet him the next morning at his house in Blacksburg. He wasn’t there when they arrived.

“He didn’t take a pair of shoes, a shirt . . . not even a toothbrush,” said Sam Larson, one of Wagner’s two roommates.

Police said Wagner, 21, was last seen about 8 p.m. May 11, when a friend dropped him off at a car rental agency in Blacksburg. He left driving a rented maroon 1996 Oldsmobile Achieva.

Officials at Virginia Tech said Wagner entered the university in fall 1992 as an engineering major and was enrolled through fall 1993. He did not enroll the following spring.

Yet during the past four years, Wagner’s parents gave him money to cover tuition, school and living expenses. His father often traveled to Blacksburg to attend Virginia Tech football and basketball games with his son.

Larson said he also thought Wagner was a student.

“He’d come in and talk about some killer test he’d had that day. . . . He’d say, ‘I just finished my big project; now I can go out and party,’ ” recalled Larson, who works as a chef at a nearby resort. “He had me buffaloed. He had everyone buffaloed.”