Noah DeWitt, a University of Oregon alumnus, has been missing since Saturday. DeWitt was last seen at The Heart and Spoon Community House in Eugene at 2 a.m. on Feb. 14. He left the house barefoot and emotionally distressed, friends said, but there was no other apparent reason for his disappearance.

Jessica Feather was a friend and one of the two Heart and Spoon residents who last saw DeWitt. She was going to bed and thought he was too, but when she checked his bedroom at approximately 7:30 a.m., he was gone.

Feather said that DeWitt is normally very stable, but he was in an unusually anxious mood. DeWitt was a witness to the Dorena bus crash a day earlier, according to Feather and other friends, and this was giving him “irrational fears.”

“He was expressing a lot of anxiety and fear about bad things happening to him and his friends and family,” Feather said. “He wasn’t in his normal, coherent mind.”

Police were notified once DeWitt had been missing for 48 hours. John Hankemeier, public information coordinator for the Eugene Police Department said the police have no further information on the disappearance.

Noah DeWitt attended the UO from 2008-2012 and worked at the Oregon Voice. His friend and fellow student Tyler Pell worked with him during that time.

Pell is now one of the organizers of a search that he says hundreds of people have participated in down the coast, posting on Craiglist and calling police stations, jails and hospitals.

“The feeling is he may have hitchhiked south,” Pell said, although he doesn’t know why DeWitt wouldn’t have told anyone. “He’s never disappeared before.”