YUCCA VALLEY, Calif. (AP) — Searchers in Southern California have found a body in the Yucca Valley desert, two months after a 30-year-old woman disappeared in the area.
The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department announced Sunday that the human remains were found in rugged terrain in the open desert on Saturday. Now the coroner’s office is working to identify them and determine a cause of death.
The sheriff’s office had searched by air and on foot for Lauren Cho, who walked away from a rental house on June 28.
The case of Cho, who is Korean American, gained new attention last month in the wake of the search for Gabby Petito. Many used social media to decry how the same public attention on Petito, a 22-year-old white woman, wasn’t being paid to missing people of color. Complaints about a phenomenon known as “missing white woman syndrome” soared as coverage of Petito did. Petito’s body was later found in Wyoming after she vanished during a cross-country trip with her boyfriend that she chronicled on social media.
The sheriff’s office said the identification process could take several weeks and that no further information will be released until those results are confirmed.
The family of Cho, who is from New Jersey, has been sharing updates on a Facebook page. They did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Associated Press on Monday.
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