Family of missing RIT student Max Maisel: 'We're praying very, very hard'
- RIT junior Max Maisel went missing on Sunday night
- He was last seen by a passerby near the Charlotte Pier
- Maisel is son of ESPN senior writer Ivan Maisel
The five-bedroom vacation home that sits on the shore of Lake Ontario is usually vacant this time of year. It's a beautiful house where the Maisel and Murray families gather during the summer when there is laughter and warmth in the air among mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, brothers and sisters, and aunts, uncles and cousins.
Now there is just concern, anxiety and fear.
"We're praying very, very hard. This is the worst thing," said Meg Murray, whose 21-year-old son Max Maisel has been missing since Sunday night. "We miss him and we can't wait to see him."
Max is 6-feet, 5-inches tall and weighs about 135 pounds, his parents said. The junior at Rochester Institute of Technology wears dark-rimmed glasses and his vehicle, a bronze 2004 Acura SUV, was found at the Charlotte Pier. Anyone with any information that could help police find Maisel is asked to call 911.
Rochester Police Department investigators are working to piece together clues, the family said during an interview Thursday afternoon. Max Maisel was last seen around 8 p.m. Sunday by a passer-by at the pier, about a mile from the Beach Avenue home the family has owned since 1999. It was windy and snowy Sunday night, but Max was dressed for the frigid weather, the passerby said, according to Max's father, Ivan Maisel.
"There was a guy who saw him get out of his car," said Ivan Maisel, a well-known senior writer for ESPN.com who covers college football. "The guy left and came back and the car was still there, and that unnerved him and he called the police."
Maisel's parents were contacted Monday night and made the 370-mile drive from their Fairfield, Connecticut, home Tuesday morning. Max had left his apartment on the RIT campus, where he is studying photography, on Sunday. He didn't have his camera or his phone with him, but his parents said that wasn't uncommon. "He's not tied to his phone," his mother said.
Ivan Maisel said he and his wife each texted Max last week and received responses from him. "We called him at some point over the weekend, and didn't hear back from him but that wasn't unusual," Ivan Maisel said. "He's not a talkative kid when you're in the same room with him."
The family said they're not aware of anyone who'd want to harm Max. Police and a SCUBA team were seen searching near the pier on Thursday.
Officials at RIT, where the family visited Max's apartment on Wednesday, have been very helpful, said Max's parents, who met with RPD chief Michael Ciminelli on Thursday morning. "Investigators have been texting us. Everyone has given us access to them. They've all been terrific," Meg Murray said.
Loves the pier
The family's vacation home is owned by Meg's sister-in-law, Deb Henretta, who is from the Rochester area, and brother, Sean Murray. In the summer, around 25 family members will squeeze into it over a long weekend.
"It's tents, cots, sleeping bags," Ivan Maisel said.
Max has 17 first cousins.
The home is usually a happy place, but the last few days have been excruciating.
Ivan's career has included stops with the Dallas Morning News, Newsday, Sports Illustrated and ESPN, where he has worked since 2002. He and his family have received support on Twitter from sports media personalities such as Dick Vitale, Mike Tirico, Colin Cowherd and Peter King, among others. Many media members have sent well-wishes and shared Max's photo in hopes that someone somewhere will know what happened to him.
"The pier area was just something that was a part of his life," his father said. "It's not a surprise at all to know he was there."
That's where an Abbott's is located. Max loves to get Cotton Candy, the sweetest of the sweet frozen custard. "He's a sweet-tooth kid," his mother said.
Walking there after dinner is a "nightly ritual," in the summer, his father added. About a mile's walk in the other direction is Schaller's, a restaurant known for its tasty hamburgers. That's another of Max's favorite Rochester spots. There's one near RIT, too.
Max has loved Abbott's for so long that when one opened near Fairfield his parents used it to cater the dessert portion of his bar mitzvah in January of 2007. By then, he was just starting to discover a couple of his passions: Photography and Anime, a style of Japanese comic books and short animation.
Some of his favorites, "RWBY" (pronounced ruby) and "Rooster Teeth," are animated series on the Internet. RIT has an Anime Club, too. As a teen Max was also a voracious reader of Harry Potter, so much so that he once read an entire book in the series on a drive from Connecticut to Rochester.
New friends
At RIT and online, he found others with interests like his. It's one reason he chose RIT over about seven other colleges where he was accepted. Max and his mother, who is from Syracuse, liked RIT so much after a campus tour, they decided not to visit the University of Rochester.
Anime enthusiasts are like their own community. From all over the country, they meet nightly online for video chats. His parents saw that over the recently completed semester break.
"He'd have his headphones on with his laptop in front of him and I'd say, 'Turn the heat down before you come up (to bed),' " Ivan recalled.
A few of those friends are here in Rochester and they've been in touch with Max's parents. "They're devastated," about his disappearance, Ivan said.
Anime is very different than Alabama, the college-football crazed state where Ivan grew up. He's from Mobile.
"I've always said the fact that my son had no interest in sports is proof that God has a sense of humor," he said Thursday, forcing a smile while repeating a sentence he's uttered for years.
But that was always OK. The Maisels let their middle child find his way. You do it your way. He does it his.
His older sister, Sarah, 23, played field hockey. Elizabeth, 17, a senior at Fairfield Warde High School, is a lacrosse player. Elizabeth is here with her parents. Sarah, a Stanford graduate like her father, is heading here from San Francisco.
"If it's good for you, good for you," his mother said, mentioning Max's philosophy on not judging others.
Max likes to laugh and loves newsy comedians such as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. His parents said he doesn't drink. His neighbor back home, a buddy who is a few years older, took him out on Jan. 15 — Max's 21st birthday — "just to say he got carded on his 21st birthday," Meg Murray said.
Picture his future
Max's first camera was actually his sister's. Elizabeth had asked for it but didn't use it.
"So we kind of traded for it," she said.
She got a phone (from her mother); Max got the Nikon D3100. He'd taken a photography class in high school and then one day the photo above the Maisel's kitchen table really caught his eye. It's of snow-capped mountains in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. The Maisels purchased it from Don Tudor during one of the family's annual ski vacations.
The photo's beauty "mesmerized us," Ivan said.
Max was thinking of majoring in history or psychology at RIT, but at the end of his first semester he knew photography was for him. A strong student, he earned a merit scholarship, too, but he's far from boastful about his work. In fact, he's quite private, his family said.
His family saw some of his landscape portraits for the first time on Wednesday. They included one of sunlight shining through tall forest trees and a long pier (not Charlotte) with some wicked clouds over water. The photos are now spread out on a pool table at the Beach Avenue house.
"He sees things I don't," his mother said of her son's eye for photography.
Last March, Max asked his father if they could visit Steamboat during his spring break because he wanted to work on a school project and use it as the backdrop. The Maisels made contact with Tudor and asked if he could spare some time to talk with Max.
The veteran landscape photographer spent three hours talking and teaching.
"He talked to him about nature photography and the importance of being patient," Ivan Maisel said. "You may have to go for several days just to know when the right light might be."
Now the Maisels can only be patient, hoping for a ray of light and good news about their son, their brother, their nephew and cousin.
JDIVERON@DemocratandChronicle.com
