FBI Joins Search for 'Abducted' Teen
Police now say Brianna Denison was likely taken from her friend's Reno home.
Jan. 22, 2008 — -- The FBI has joined the investigation into what police now say was likely the abduction of a teenage woman from a friend's Reno, Nev., home sometime Sunday morning.
Brianna Denison, 19, was reported missing when a friend she was staying with after attending a party at a Reno casino awoke Sunday to find Denison missing and a small blood stain on the pillow she had been given to use.
"We are investigating this as an abduction," Steve Frady, a spokesman for the Reno Police Department, confirmed to ABC News.
The blood stain, which is being analyzed in a crime lab, was not the only factor that caused alarm for authorities and family members of Denison, who is a native of Reno. Dension left the house without her shoes, cell phone or purse. Authorities believe she was barefoot, wearing only what she had worn to bed -- sweats and a white tank top.
As officers and canines canvassed the area near the house today for any sign of Denison, the young woman's family offered an unspecified reward in the case, as did the Secret Witness Program, an anonymous tip line taking information on her disappearance.
Tips, Frady said, continue to come to investigators. "We are continuing to talk to people," he said. "We are getting information, and we're continuing to follow those leads."
Authorities also continue to seek an unnamed man in his 40s, who they believe may have information about Denison's whereabouts.
The man became implicated in the abduction investigation after he dropped another one of Denison's friends at the same house where she had been staying. Many college-age women share the rental house near the University of Nevada.
Authorities say that the man picked up Denison's friend around 1 a.m. Sunday at the Sands Regency Hotel Casino after she failed to find a taxi. The driver, considered for now a "person of interest" rather than a "suspect," dropped the young woman at the house roughly three hours before Denison and another friend returned from the same party.
