NOT THE SHARPEST KNIFE IN THE DRAWER: Woman Pretends She Was Kidnapped To Avoid Graduation Party
Nancy Salas wrote about being stressed out over homework and exams on her blog, told her friends about applying to graduate school and sometimes asked the woman for whom she baby sat whether she could come over a bit later than usual so she could attend office hours with a professor. Anticipating her graduation next month from UCLA with a degree in sociology, her family and friends were planning a party – but then she suddenly went missing, reports the Los Angeles Times:
Police unfurled a massive air and ground search in the hills near the Salas family apartment on the day of her disappearance. When they didn't find any clues, investigators began to look into Salas' college life at UCLA. They wanted to know with whom she was associating and whether she had problems there.
“You have a life at home, but in college you have another life,” Lorenz said. But investigators were baffled when they learned that Salas had not been going to UCLA since 2008.
Salas had concocted the elaborate hoax to avoid telling her parents, immigrants from El Salvador, that she had dropped out of school. Panicked over the impending graduation celebration, she lit out on a bus from Los Angeles to Merced but became homesick. Salas went to a flooring store and told employees that she had been kidnapped and asked them to call 9-1-1.
Glendale police spokesperson Sgt. Tom Lorenz tells The Times that Salas explained that her family and friends “idolized” her, and “[s]he couldn’t … tell them that she was not the person she had led everyone to believe she was.”
Glendale police do not plan to charge Salas with a crime, but their counterparts in Merced may press charges for false reporting of a crime.
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