BRUNSWICK – A 16-year-old Brunswick youth who had been missing for a month before her body was found this week died of blunt head injuries, law enforcement officials said Thursday.

The victim, positively identified as Cody Green, did not die in a chance encounter, said Tim Doyle, a state police detective.

“I am satisfied that this was not a random act of violence,” he said.

State police will continue to work closely with Brunswick police and the Sagadahoc County Sheriff’s Department, said Stephen McCausland, spokesman for the Maine Department of Public Safety.

The body was found Tuesday by a cadaver dog during a search by police, wardens and sheriff’s deputies in woods behind a home in Bowdoin.

Friends of Green said investigators would have been more aggressive if the 16-year-old had been a clean-cut honor student rather than a high school dropout whose navel, nose, tongue, eyebrow and lips were pierced.

“She liked to party. I did, too,” said Guy Drumm, who works at a body-piercing business on Maine Street and knew Green and her family.

“But that’s no excuse for dismissing this human being.”

McCausland said Green had run away from home two years ago and police had good reason to suspect she had done so again.

“It was not unusual for this girl to be away from home for days at a time,” McCausland said.

“They [police] had that dynamic to deal with. It was not unusual for her to disappear,”he said.

Green was last seen May 26 when a Brunswick taxi driver dropped her off at the Bowdoin home, police said. Before she got in the cab, Green told her mother that she was going to visit a teen-age girlfriend in Bowdoin, police said.

Residents of the house include Trudy Bither, her teen-age son and her son’s teen-age girlfriend, McCausland said.

He would not identify the teen-agers, and nobody in the house would answer the door Wednesday.

On Wednesday, a team of detectives from the state, county and Brunswick police met for two hours in Augusta to compare notes and get new assignments, McCausland said.

Green has five siblings. Her parents, Susan Goulding and Tony Green, are divorced and declined to return phone calls Wednesday.

Green’s friends in Brunswick maintained that her background worked against her.

If a doctor’s daughter had gone missing, the police – and the media – would have been more aggressive, Brian Bois, 19, said Wednesday.

“They should have taken more action,” Bois said. “But it’s all about class. That’s what this world is about.”