A Georgia Tech student missing since Friday was found Monday morning along railroad tracks in Atlanta, badly injured but alive, police said.
Jimmy Hubert, 24, an aerospace engineering student and Phi Delta Theta fraternity brother, was last seen leaving a Greek party Friday night at 11 p.m., according to Georgia Tech. He was found early Monday by a friend, Emma Jeffery.
"Emma calls me, hysterical, that they found him and he is not responding," Christian Battaglia, 21, one of Hubert's fraternity brothers, told NBC News. "Everyone in the house heard me crying out."
Battaglia and other friends raced to the spot where Jeffery had found Hubert as they waited for an ambulance. Hubert was face-down on the tracks, Battaglia said, covered in blood.
"His right eye was badly bruised," he said. "His face was just really messed up — dried blood all over his lips. ... He had some stuff on his back that looked like dried blood."
Police did not provide details about Hubert's condition, but Hubert's mom, Diane Hubert, said on Facebook that he was attacked after taking the train home from the party and "mugged robbed and had the s*** beaten out of him."
"He's in ICU with broken vertebrae, Broken ribs, Broken scapula, Punctured Lung, Blood on the brain, Paralyzed left side (Hopefully temporary). He's in a lot of pain and on morphine resting," she wrote.
"When he got off the train he was JUMPED BEATEN UP ROBBED & LEFT FOR DEAD," she said.
Hubert was taken to a local hospital, Battaglia said. He can speak, but with difficulty.
"Due to his injuries, we have not been able to interview Mr. Hubert about the circumstances over the last few days," Atlanta police spokesperson Elizabeth Espy said in a statement.
Jeffery, the friend who found him, told NBC affiliate WXIA Hubert's date had left her phone in Hubert's pocket, and that they located him nearly seven miles away from the party along the train through the Find My iPhone app. She said Hubert was struggling to remember what had happened.
"We’ve gotten out of him, 'I was jumped by a homeless person,'" Jeffery said. "Then we got, he 'was beat up by a group of people,' then he said he was 'hit by a train', but we think he heard the trains going by, just lying there helpless.
"I can’t decide if I think he walked the train tracks or he was placed there. Because his shoes were not on his feet. All of his belongings — his wallet, phone is gone. He said he was beat up, so I think he was mugged and maybe dumped there."
Battaglia said neither of the two phones was found on Hubert, and that the Find My iPhone app placed them several hundred yards away from where they discovered him. His mom said on Facebook that no drugs or alcohol were involved.
Lance Wallace, a Georgia Tech spokesman, told NBC News that because the incident happened off-campus, the Atlanta police department had "taken over the investigation to figure out what happened."
Hubert, an undergraduate, is enrolled in a co-operative education internship program through his aerospace engineer major, Wallace said. Because the program combines classroom and real work experience, it sometimes takes students more than four years to complete.
"Thanks go to the students for not giving up on their friend," Rob Connolly, chief of the Georgia Tech Police Department, said in a statement.
