Adapted from the article, Who is Tara Grant?, Detroit News, 2-24-2007
Robert Snell, Francis X. Donnelly and Ronald J. Hansen / The Detroit News

PERKINS -- Tara Grant was a cheerleader, a skeet shooter with her own .22-caliber rifle, a clarinet player in the school band and a 4-H club enthusiast who slept in a camper every August with her family at the U.P. State Fair.

Friends in Tara's Upper Peninsula hometown, about 20 miles north of Escanaba, followed each development from afar, posting news articles on a wall inside Faith Lutheran Church and including a simple plea: "Pray for Tara Please."

They reassured themselves with tales of a tough-minded woman who once upon a time would simply hop back on when bucked by her gray-spotted Appaloosa named "RJ's Broken Fingers."

It's the small memories that are comforting childhood friends in Perkins, the small town where Tara Destrampe grew up, a town that had one blinking traffic light, two churches, a grocery store and as many bars as churches -- a town ringed by forest and a few potato farms, a close-knit place that viewed new residents like the Destrampes as outsiders. The family moved there from Escanaba when Tara was 21 months old.

"It's Podunk nowhere," said Tara's sister, Alicia Standerfer, 32, now of Chillicothe, Ohio.

Perkins is where kids knew Tara by the nickname "Felix."

"I [didn't] see her ever taking off like that on her own," said friend Phillip Croasdell, 35, who graduated in 1990 with Tara from Mid Peninsula School, home of the Wolverines. "Her family values were always high. To not talk to her parents or her children ... that's not her at all."

She grew up on 28-acre farm

Friends who grew up with her recall her as a determined teen who dabbled in almost everything.

That determination fueled a rise to a job with one of the country's top engineering and construction firms.

Tara grew up on a 28-acre farm with a horse, a chicken coop and a couple of cows, but the family didn't make any money off it, relatives said.

Her mom and sister remember Tara with two curly pigtails, always smiling and always talking.

She talked so much in elementary school that her parents began rewarding her with a stick of gum if she completed a day without being disciplined for talking.

"She loved life," said her mom, Mary Destrampe, who also lives in Chillicothe. "She loved people and they loved her."

Tara and her sister did chores on the farm, patching holes in fences, baling hay and cleaning the barn -- sometimes.

"She preferred cleaning the house more than the barn," her sister said.

She was an enthusiastic member of 4-H activities, in part because she loved being with the animals, but also because she enjoyed competition, said Jennifer Bagwell, Hanson's sister who still lives in Rock, near Perkins.

The 4-H activities helped raise money for the Destrampes' daughters to go to college, said Thomas and Shireen McLaughlin, Tara Grant's aunt and uncle in Gladstone, near where she was raised.

Young Tara was a deer hunter and went rabbit hunting every Saturday during the season and every Christmas Eve with her dad, Dusty Destrampe, a retired utility worker at the now-closed K.I. Sawyer Air Force Base in Gwinn, about 31 miles north of Perkins.

The family also loved to go backpacking, traveling all over the U.P., including weeklong trips to the Porcupine Mountains and Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore along the southern shore of Lake Superior.

Asked to describe her, mother and sister answered at the same time: "Fun loving."

As she aged, those curly pigtails changed.

The teen liked her bangs long.

Five inches long, and she would double-check her beautician's work to make sure. Then, she hair-sprayed the heck out of them until they formed a frozen line pointing north.

"We called it 'The Wall,' " Hanson said.

Classmate Clifford Gobert remembers Tara as a "smart girl." The two had government class together their senior year.

"Very nice and an easy-going person -- the kind of person you can walk up to and talk to at any time," the 35-year-old Escanaba man said, calling her disappearance "tragic."

She graduated from MSU

After graduating third in a class of about 40 students in 1990, Tara enrolled at Bay de Noc Community College in Escanaba on a full scholarship. She left with an associate's degree in business.

But she was itching to move away from the quiet U.P. and go someplace with more culture, her sister said. She really loved art.

So she fulfilled a dream and enrolled at Michigan State University. She had always wanted to go to MSU, where she spent every summer since age 14 attending a weeklong 4-H summer camp.

It's also where she would meet her future husband.

Tara experienced culture shock after moving to East Lansing. She partied too much her first semester, but made up for it working hard the next three semesters.

"She loved it, maybe too much," her sister said. "She loved everything about it."

Tara may have left Perkins, but Perkins never left her, her sister said.

"Her roots are country bumpkin," she said. "You can't take that away, no matter what you do."

She had several roommates while attending MSU, one of whom had a friend named Stephen Grant.

She was impressed that he was working for then-state Sen. Jack Faxon, D-Farmington Hills, right after graduating from MSU. "It was the excitement of him knowing the area (Lansing)," her mom said. "He wined and dined her."

Knowing of Tara's love of the arts, Stephen Grant proposed to her on the steps of the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Tara graduated from MSU in 1994 with a bachelor's degree in business administration, with an emphasis on marketing. The next year, she landed an entry-level job working for Washington Group International, a company based in Boise, Idaho.

It was a good fit. She is talkative, a natural saleswoman, relatives said. "It was different and exciting," her mom said. "She was always up for a challenge."

'She had found her passion'

Tara Grant always wanted a job in business, her mom said, and over the course of 12 years, rose within the company. She is based out of the firm's Troy office and is general manager of the firm's office in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

"It was clear at an early time that she had found her passion," her sister said.

Her work ethic -- honed on the family farm -- lent itself to the job and juggling family life raising two children, ages 6 and 4.

No matter how busy she got, Tara Grant regularly called her children and talked to her parents and sister, the McLaughlins said.