A body has been uncovered amid the urgent pursuit to find a Texas teenager who mysteriously disappeared from her home on Christmas Eve.
Nineteen-year-old Camila Mendoza Olmos was last captured on a neighbor’s security footage as she left her San Antonio neighborhood shortly before 7 a.m. on Wednesday. This initiated a week-long search, with authorities expressing concerns about her being in ‘imminent danger.’
On Tuesday, the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office announced that a body had been located in a field ‘very close to Camila’s home,’ as reported by WFAA News.
The discovery came as sheriff’s deputies and FBI agents intensified their search efforts in a field they revisited due to its thick vegetation.
However, Sheriff Javier Salazar mentioned that the medical examiner has not yet confirmed the identity of the deceased, nor determined the cause and manner of death, according to the source.
“We are working to expedite the process to provide the community with answers,” Salazar stated.
He added that he hopes the medical examiner will release answers regarding the identity within the next day or two.
‘We developed some information that there may have been some suicidal ideations on Camila’s part,’ the sheriff said.
A body has been found in the frantic search for Texas teen, Camila Mendoza Olmos, 19, who mysteriously vanished from her home on Christmas Eve
‘Undiagnosed, as far as we can tell,’ he added. ‘It sounds like this was a young person going through a very tough time in her life, going through some emotional issues.’
The discovery comes one week after the college student vanished from her mother’s driveway on Christmas Eve morning, where she had been living while attending nearby Northwest Vista College with hopes of becoming an orthodontist.
Olmos’ childhood friend Camila Estrella said their last conversation was a day before her disappearance, when they planned to go dress shopping for her boyfriend’s family event.
Estrella told the New York Post that Olmos’ parting words were, ‘Bye Cami, I love you.’
Her sudden disappearance immediately prompted urgent pleas from her family, with authorities recognizing the area she vanished from as a human-trafficking corridor.
On the morning of her disappearance, KENS obtained surveillance footage showing Olmos near her car with the lights on, wearing only a hoodie and pajama shorts.
Investigators said the footage shows Olmos searching inside the car for an unidentified item before the video abruptly ends.
Authorities noted that her car was still parked at home, suggesting she left on foot. From that point, she was never seen again.
Olmos’s family said she normally goes for morning walks but always takes her phone, insisting it was out of character for her to leave without telling them where she was going.
Her mother, Rosario Olmos, told KENS 5 that they had been sleeping together that morning. She said Camila got up, and about an hour and a half later, she did too – but there were no signs of Camila except for her car.
‘I called her cell phone, but the cell phone was there on the bed and it was turned off,’ her mother told the outlet.
‘I put it to charge and went out to look for her,’ she added. ‘I thought I would find her like other times – walking – and we would come home together.’
On Sunday, Sheriff Salazar told ABC News that authorities were ‘not ruling out that this case may take us outside the borders of the continental United States.’
He made it a personal mission to ensure she had not been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers, noting it was a ‘concern’ that had crossed his mind at the beginning of the search, despite Olmos being a US citizen.
