Missing Princeton student Lauren Blackburn found dead at lake near campus — week after vanishing

The body of a missing Princeton junior was recovered from a lake that borders the New Jersey campus, ending a nearly week-long search for the student.

Lauren Blackburn, 23, was found in Lake Carnegie on Friday morning, according to Princeton’s Department of Safety. A cause of death was not immediately revealed.

“I am deeply saddened to share with you that the body of Lauren Blackburn ’26 was found at Lake Carnegie this morning. Our hearts are heavy and we share our deepest condolences with Lauren’s family and friends,” Dean of Undergraduate Students Regan Crotty wrote in a letter to the school.

Blackburn, who was majoring in English, was last seen near the college’s Firestone Library at around 6 p.m. on April 19 before he vanished, the school said.

School officials reported Blackburn as missing on Tuesday through a campus alert.

Officials pinged his phone in the area of the man-made reservoir around midnight Tuesday, prompting a water search to begin.

Lake Carnegie sits just south of campus — near the university’s athletic complex — but about a mile from the library where Blackburn was last seen.

The lake was a gift from steel industrialist Andrew Carnegie for a cost of $450,000, which is approximately $9.5 million today, the school said.

The reservoir sits on 263 acres with a uniform depth of nine feet at a 35-foot distance from the shoreline.

A former features writer for the Daily Princetonian, the student newspaper, Blackburn was the most recent winner of the 2024 Sam Hutton Fund for the Arts.

The award is given to one student in the Lewis Center for the Arts “to support undergraduate summer study, travel, and independent research.”

Before attending Princeton, Blackburn graduated from Corydon Central High School in southern Indiana.

He made local headlines in 2019 as a high school senior when he was awarded a National Merit Scholarship and Gates Scholarship.

Teachers praised the then-teenager as a kind student with an excellent memory.

“He can read a book and know everything in it,” English teacher Kate Robinson told WAVE at the time. “I’m pretty sure he has a photographic memory.”

”He’s kind,” science teacher Karen York added. “I have never, ever once heard him ever speak a bad word.”

Blackburn’s death marks the sixth of an undergraduate at the school since 2021, with all five previously being ruled as suicides, the Daily Princetonian noted.

Junior sociology major Misrach Ewunetie was found dead near the school’s tennis courts in October 2022 after being reported missing six days earlier.

An autopsy confirmed Ewunetie died from “bupropion, escitalopram and hydroxyzine toxicity,” the Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office announced.