Public Asked to Help Find Woman : Navy Petty Officer Missing Since She Left Ship on Aug. 3

A public appeal has been made for help in finding a Buena Park man’s daughter who has not been seen since she left her Navy ship Aug. 3.

Friends of Richard Morrison said Thursday that they fear his daughter, Tammy Leigh Morrison, 21, may be the victim of foul play. The petty officer had indicated to shipmates that she intended to return the following day to the Norton Sound, a missile-testing platform docked at Port Hueneme in Ventura County.

The missing woman and her father, an engineer with the Leach Corp., were very close, said Same Conrad, a friend whom Morrison enlisted to help spread his plea Thursday for help in finding his daughter.

“She knows how much he cares for her, and she’d have to know he’s out of his mind nuts about now. That’s the part that sticks with me most. I can’t believe she wouldn’t have called him by now if she was somewhere of her own will,” Conrad said.

A spokesman at Navy headquarters in San Diego said Morrison, who has been assigned to the Norton Sound as a member of its telephone repair crew since January, left all of her personal belongings aboard ship.

“It is not uncommon for people to disappear from the ships of their own volition,” said Chief Petty Officer Paul Versailles, assistant public affairs officer for the Naval Service Force Pacific Fleet. “This, we feel, is different.

“We have several indicators that there was no prior intent to leave the ship. All of her personal effects but her car and the clothes off her back were on board. . . . This was a very positive, happy person who was doing a fine job and enjoying it, and now she’s gone. And that’s out of character.”

Versailles said Morrison’s shipmates have indicated that they don’t believe that she has remained away “on her own will.”

”. . . As she was leaving the ship she waved to a friend on board and said, ‘See you tomorrow,’ ” he said.

Ventura County law-enforcement authorities are investigating the disappearance, which was reported Aug. 11, and have interviewed all of her shipmates, including a boyfriend she had broken up with before she left the Norton Sound, Conrad said.

Morrison is described as 5 feet, 9 inches tall, 130 pounds, with brown hair and green eyes. Her car--a blue, two-door Honda Civic with California license plate 1 MGG 484--has not been found.

The father has appealed to anyone with information about his daughter’s whereabouts to call the Oxnard Police Department or local law-enforcement agencies, which have been notified of her disappearance by Ventura County authorities.