Fears grow for Canadian student who vanished from Los Angeles hotel
Baffled Los Angeles police say Vancouver resident Elisa Lam may have met with foul play when she vanished from her hotel in January
The young Chinese woman enters the lift of her Los Angeles hotel, before pressing every button. When the doors fail to close, she peers nervously out and down the hallway, before retreating again to hide in a corner of the lift.
The bizarre behaviour, captured on CCTV footage at least two weeks old, represents the last confirmed sighting of 21-year-old Vancouver student Elisa Lam.
Los Angeles police investigating her baffling disappearance fear that Lam may have met with foul play after arriving in Los Angeles on January 26, apparently on a short vacation.
Police said that she intended to travel onwards to Santa Cruz, and that she had been in daily contact with her parents until she vanished on January 31 without checking out of her room at the Cecil Hotel close to the city's notorious skid row.
"This is highly unusual behaviour for her," said Lieutenant Walter Teague of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), referring to Lam's disappearance and failure to contact her parents.
The case attracted a brief flurry of interest when it was first reported in early February, but the emergence of the lift video, released last week by the LAPD's robbery and homicide division, added a disturbing twist that thrust the case back into the spotlight and sparked intense speculation about Lam's fate.