Nichole Sherman

November 16, 2011 06:35 PM EST
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Nichole Sherman is missing from Northwestern Oregon in a disappearance that police call "highly suspicious." What happened to the college student, missing since Sunday?

Rainier-area teen missing since Sunday

The 19-year-old Columbia County woman was last seen Sunday afternoon when she was reported to have been on her way to a friend's home, which was only two miles away from her own. Sources are reporting that the missing college student never made it to her destination. How did Nichole Sherman manage to vanish without a trace in a span of just two miles?

"This is a highly suspicious disappearance, and we are putting extra effort into finding out what happened to Ms. Sherman. We are hoping someone might have seen her or her vehicle either in the area of her residence at the time of her disappearance or later in the Longview area." -- said Sheriff Jeff Dickerson.

When a college student is seemingly abducted or missing under suspicious circumstances, it seems to hit the news aggressively. This has been noted with such cases as the disappearance of 20-year-old nursing student, Holly Bobo -- as well as missing nursing student Michelle Le, and missing Fashion student Lauren Spierer. When young, promising women who are furthering their lives go missing without any clues leading to their whereabouts, it's just tragic. Hopefully 19-year-old Nichole Sherman is found safe, and this is all just a big misunderstanding.

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Nichole "Nikki" Sherman, the Lower Columbia College student missing since Nov. 13, was found dead in her car Saturday, the apparent victim of a crash not far from her rural Columbia County home, according to Sheriff Jeff Dickerson.
Sherman's Red Chevrolet Cavalier was found about an hour into the first full search conducted by the Columbia County Search and Rescue Team. It was about 100 feet off Apiary Road, down a 20 foot embankment in a creek bed surrounded by trees, Dickerson said. Previous flyovers and searches by car had not found any trace of Sherman, leading officials to believe she had either left the area or had been abducted.
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The mystery surrounding the month-long disappearance of a 19-year-old Rainier woman was solved this week as search and rescuers found the teenager’s body seatbelted inside her wrecked car a few miles from her home.

Nichole Sherman was last seen Nov. 13 while driving from her Meissner Road home to a friend’s house on Apiary Road – a few miles away. Investigators say it now appears she crashed during that trip.

An autopsy performed Monday by the State Medical Examiner found that Sherman died from blunt force head trauma. They ruled her death an accident.

Family, friends, police and a private search and rescue team, have spent the last month scouring the region, including Longview where Sherman attended Lower Community College, to find any clues. Nothing turned up.

Because no car had been found and the area had been searched multiple times, including by private aircraft, the Columbia County Sheriff’s Office originally ruled the missing person case as “highly suspicious.” Throughout the month, officers worked any leads they could find –including hunches that the disappearance may have been criminal in nature.

Based on a crash scene investigation, it seems Sherman veered off the road, wrapped the car’s passenger side against a tree and plummeted down into a 20-foot-deep gully.

Although numerous searches were ongoing, the day Sherman was found was the first day the county’s official search and rescue team was activated. That’s because the rural region is so expansive and investigators had no good starting point to begin a detailed ground search, Dickerson said.

“If you don’t have a good starting place, you don’t know where to look,” Dickerson said about the choice to not activate the nearly 25-member volunteer team until this week.

“It was not really a search and rescue effort at that point.”
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