Northern California IRS Agent, Gun Missing
Searchers in California fail to find backpack linked to Veronica Ruiz, 25.
Dec. 10, 2007 — -- Volunteer searchers could not find a backpack belonging to a 25-year-old IRS agent who went missing one week ago after a difficult breakup with her boyfriend.
The discovery in a Northern California state park would have been the first clue uncovered since Veronica Ruiz told family and friends last Monday that she was going for a hike near Mount Tamalpias.
But Maricris Ruiz, Veronica's sister, said that she traced the steps taken by search volunteers Sunday who claimed to see a backpack matching the description of the missing woman's in the distance. She could not locate the item.
Authorities suspended the official search in the park for Ruiz Wednesday after finding no evidence that she was the victim of foul play.
"We've eliminated anything that might have been suspicious," Dean Loutas, a Mill Valley detective, told ABC News. "We're not talking about a kidnap victim or anything like that."
Loutas said that Ruiz's car was found parked at her house near the base of the mountain. The only things that were missing, Loutas said, were her work credentials, her government-issued firearm, a backpack and her running gear. The last time her cell phone was used was 2:09 p.m. last Monday.
Ruiz, a criminal investigator for the San Rafael office of the Internal Revenue Service, is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and worked at the tax and audit firm KPMG before joining the federal tax agency, her sister told ABC News.
Ruiz and her boyfriend of two years broke up last weekend. Last Monday, Ruiz, who goes by the nickname "Nikki," called in sick to work. She then declined an offer to have lunch that day with a friend who was concerned about her, The San Francisco Chronicle reported.
During that telephone call, Ruiz told the friend that she was going to go for a hike in Mount Tamalpias State Park to clear her head. The woman was known by her family for hiking the local mountain and running the distance to the Golden Gate Bridge.
Despite the decision by authorities to suspend the official search for Ruiz, which included local police, sheriff's officers, park rangers, the FBI, IRS and tracking dogs, after two days, friends and family pushed ahead with volunteer searches this weekend and created a Web site to bring attention to her search.
Police investigating the case received reports from two citizens who claimed to see Ruiz the day she vanished, one at 11 a.m. at a trail head in the park and the second at noon at an inn on the mountain slope, the day she vanished, according to the Mill Valley Police Department. Neither sighting could be confirmed.
"If she was active and alive and detectable, we would have come across her by now," Loutas said. "We've exhausted all of our possibilities."
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