Good points all. Seems like her phone got into someone else's hands. Making the victim look bad is often the first choice of a perp. They think it gives them more time to cover their tracks. Someone previously posted that this young woman worked two jobs in Gridley, that she was never absent from either job and attended Yuba College, which is located way the heck out on North Beale Road in Linda, south of Marysville. Quite a long way to travel to Yuba College when you live up in Gridley. Sounds like a very responsible person to me, no matter what her age. Ransom texts are creepy, hopefully LE has the IT forensic people tracking the IP.
Any way you look at the map, there is absolutely no reason to go to Cooley rd or Pennington even if she was taking back roads. It's way out of the way. And as someone has mentioned before, if she took back roads often, she would have known where she was going and wouldn't have likely gotten lost. And even if she was lost, there's no reason to drive onto a levee like that. I would be way too scared to do that, especially if I was by myself. The only logical reason I could think of for someone to drive out there voluntarily is to look for a private place to park, maybe to smoke or hook up with someone.
I'm wondering if they got the 7:51pm time from the restaurant surveillance footage. And for a young girl who is supposedly always on her phone, it seems a little off that she wouldn't have posted anything or texted anyone after that...
I'm wondering, though... If someone at the Romero house had anything to do with it, why would they admit she had been drinking? Does that make them look more or less guilty? Maybe by saying she had been drinking they thought they could make whatever happened seem like her fault, but on the other hand, admitting she had been drinking does make them look bad because she is underage and they let her drive.
Besides all that, the news that those ransom texts were a hoax has me so pissed off. Would someone really do that just to troll that family? Or does anyone think someone did that to throw the investigation off?