The family of a California woman found dead in a remote part of Arizona a month after she vanished is considering a lawsuit after emergency responders in California failed to locate her from an hour-long 911 call.
Amanda Nenigar called 911 early in the morning on February 27, a day before her family reported her missing, and told a dispatcher she thought she might have fallen asleep at the wheel, the Los Angeles Times reported.
She had left a hotel just before 4 a.m. that morning and was reportedly heading for Palm Springs.
“I was tired so I went to go pull over, but I think I like ran off the road.” the 27-year-old said in the phone call about three hours later.
Nenigar, without cell service except to make emergency calls, even read out the coordinates of her location.
Nenigar’s call connected to the California HIghway Patrol in El Centro, AZFamily.com reported. But she wasn’t in California. She was over the state line in a mountainous area of La Paz County, Arizona. Once authorities there got involved about a week later, they found her car, it’s back end stuck on a boulder, as CrimeOnline reported. Her body was found on March 29, about a mile and a half from the car.
Nenigar described the area where she was to the dispatcher
“Yeah, there’s just a lot of mountains,” she said. “But I climbed to like a high mountain and I’m wearing pink.”
Near the end, she said she was scared.
“Are you guys going to find me?” she asked.
“Well, we’re doing what we can to find you, okay?” the dispatcher responded.
It’s not clear where the CHP was looking. The La Paz County Sheriff’s Office said it found the coordinates Nenigar read out right away, and her car was about a mile away. Even so, it was three more weeks before a search and rescue crew found her body. They’re now waiting for an autopsy.
“It’s frustrating to be in the situation that we are in right now,” La Paz County Sheriff William Ponce told the Times. “The first 24 to 48 hours of any investigation are critical. I believe that had we been apprised of this incident immediately upon her disappearance by the other local agencies, we could have probably started to initiate some type of search. We didn’t know she was in our area.”
“My sister was still out there suffering,” her sister, Marissa Nenigar, told AZFamily. “Who knows how many days it took for her to die? We don’t want this to happen to anyone else ever. It’s horrible.”
Nenigar’s mother, Jaime Mcbroom, told the Times her daughter struggled with mental illness and addiction, possibly accounting for her telling the dispatcher someone was trying to kill her and she was trying to get away.
“She was trying to get through it,” Mcbroom said. “Her mind goes through psychosis when she’s withdrawing or when her body’s detoxing, and I think that’s why she ended up out there.”
The family said that if they do file a lawsuit and win, any money that comes from it would go to Amanda Nenigar’s 8- and 2-year-old daughters.
For the latest true crime and justice news, subscribe to the ‘Crime Stories with Nancy Grace’ podcast.
[Featured image: Amanda Nenigar/Facebook]
