The body of Elizabeth Elena Laguna-Salgado, last seen on a busy Provo street in 2015, has been found in Hobble Creek Canyon, Utah news outlets reported Wednesday night.
A spokesman for the Utah County Sheriff’s Office would not comment Wednesday, except to say that a news conference will take place Thursday morning in Spanish Fork.
The case is being treated as a homicide, reports said.
The discovery, it seems, would bring an end to a mystery that began April 16, 2015, when Laguna-Salgado, then 26, disappeared while walking home from classes at the Nomen Global Language Center in Provo. She sent a text to her sister in Mexico at 1:30 p.m., and her cellphone pinged for the last time from a tower near the school and her home not long after that.
Provo police investigated her disappearance, aided by the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, Interpol and other agencies. Hundreds of tips came in from across the country, but none turned up any clues to Laguna-Salgado’s whereabouts.
The case brought an outpouring of support to Laguna-Salgado’s family, including help from onetime kidnapping victim Elizabeth Smart.
Laguna-Salgado had earned a college degree in her native Mexico. She followed that by going on a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and coming to Utah to study English — which she still had not learned when she disappeared.
“We have hope and we have faith,” her uncle, Rosenberg Salgado, said last month. “The Lord is going to help us find her. You always have to think positive.”
