Homicide Investigation Launched for Missing Woman

Officials say they have no evidence that she’s dead, but Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca has ordered a homicide investigation into the disappearance of Mitrice Richardson.

Richardson disappeared after leaving the Lost Hills sheriff’s station on September 17 and was seen the next morning in the Monte Nido area.

“He has declared it a homicide investigation. That does not mean the sheriff believes Ms. Richardson is dead. But by opening up a homicide investigation, it does allow the Sheriff’s Department to put some of our top investigators on the case,” department spokesman Steve Whitmore told the L.A. Times.

Authorities also stated, for the first time, that they had recovered and read several of Richardson’s person journals found in her car.

Partially based on those diaries, police believe that the young woman had a “major mental breakdown” and had gone without sleep for as many as five nights before the incident at Geoffrey’s restaurant in Malibu, which resulted in her arrest.

Mental health professionals who read the journals say she may have been suffering from severe bipolar disorder.

The case has generated extra attention, with some of Richardson’s friends and family blaming the Sheriff’s Department for releasing her with no money, no car and no cell phone during the predawn hours. Authorities respond that she was an adult who was apparently not impaired, that they offered to let her stay at the station and had no further reason to keep her incarcerated.

Her family says Richardson was a straight-A graduate of Cal State Fullerton who had recently passed a test to become a substitute teacher. She was a finalist in the 2007 Miss Fullerton pageant and worked as an executive assistant in a shipping company.

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