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Janet Knudson has volunteered at the Center Against Rape and Domestic Violence in Corvallis since early 2006. Sometimes Knudson wonders if her sister Jill would still be alive today had she known about CARDV or a similar sanctuary. Jill, one of Knudson’s three older sisters, was 46 when her husband killed her in September 2005.

“You never think something like this will happen to you or anyone you know,” Knudson said. “Maybe if she’d asked for help or known that there was a safe place to go rather than staying in her house, events would have been different.”

“He might have survived, or he might have succumbed to exhaustion, dehydration, or hypothermia,” said Todd Shechter (’99 B.S., Management Information Systems), a member of the all-volunteer Corvallis Mountain Rescue Unit (CMRU).

Not every CMRU mission has a happy ending, and at the start of each one — a dozen or more a year — that nagging question hangs in the air: Is this going to be a rescue or a body recovery?