During the eight days that Tanya Rider lay seriously injured in her crashed sport utility vehicle, her husband was fighting to get authorities to launch a search for her, he said on Friday.
Rider (33) was found alive but dehydrated at the bottom of a steep ravine on Thursday, more than a week after she failed to return home from work.
Authorities had been able to detect the general location of her cellphone that morning, then searched along the highway she travelled from work in suburban Seattle to her Maple Valley home. They noticed some matted brush, and below it they found Rider’s Honda Element, smashed on its side, State Patrol spokesperson Jeff Merrill said.
”She looks very pale, very dehydrated. She didn’t have a lot of cuts, but had difficulty breathing,” Merrill said.
On Friday morning, Rider was sedated in critical condition and fighting for her life at Harborview Medical Centre, said her husband, Tom Rider. He said she was suffering from kidney failure and sores from lying in the same position for a week and that she could lose her leg.
”All I know is that she’s here and she’s alive, and that, in itself, is a miracle,” he told CNN. ”She’s alive after eight days. If God was going to take her, he would have taken her before that.”
Tanya Rider left work at a grocery store in Bellevue on September 19, but never made it home. When her husband could not reach her, he said, he called Bellevue police to report his wife missing.
Bellevue police took the report right away, but when they found video of Tonya Rider getting into her car after work, they told her husband the case was out of their jurisdiction and he should notify King county, he said.
Tom said he tried that, but ”the first operator I talked to on the first day I tried to report it flat denied to start a missing-persons report because she didn’t meet the criteria”, he said.
”I basically hounded them until they started a case and then, of course, I was the first focal point, so I tried to get myself out of the way as quickly as possible. I let them search the house. I told them they didn’t have to have a warrant for anything, just ask,” he said.
Tom said he also drove the route where his wife was found, but did not see any sign of a crash. He also offered a $25 000 reward for any information leading to her safe return.
On Thursday morning, detectives asked him to come in to sign for a search of phone records. They also asked him to take a polygraph test.
”By the time he was done explaining the polygraph test to me, the detective burst into the room with a cellphone map that had a circle on it,” he said. He said the detective started explaining the blip they had found and within minutes, news arrived that Tanya had been found.
Her car had tumbled about 6m down a ravine and lay buried below heavy brush and blackberry bushes. Rescuers had to cut the roof off to get her out.
”I know there were delays [in finding her] because of red tape,” Tom said.
Tanya was still behind the wheel and pinned against the front end of the car, Merrill said. All the air bags had deployed, he said, but she could not escape because of her injuries and the crushed state of the vehicle.
A King county sheriff’s spokesperson expressed sympathy, but said the agency followed standard procedure in the case. ”That’s a terrible, terrible experience … a heart-wrenching experience, and my heart goes out to him,” Deputy Rodney C Chinnick said on Friday.
”It’s not that we didn’t take him seriously,” he said. ”We don’t take every missing-persons report on adults … If we did, we’d be doing nothing but going after missing-persons reports.”
Adults are entitled to privacy if they decide to do something out of the ordinary, and Chinnick said Rider’s initial missing-persons report did not contain either of the two elements that would trigger an immediate search: evidence of foul play or unusual vulnerability such as age, mental condition or lack of critical medications.
”Not showing up at home is not illegal,” he said. — Sapa-AP