A Native American woman vanished earlier this month while vacationing in Las Vegas with her fiancé and friends, and now her family is desperate to find her.
The family and friends of 30-year-old Reatha May Finkbonner, who is a member of the Lummi Nation, a tribal community near Bellingham, Washington, have been searching for their loved one since she went missing on Sept. 3 during the Las Vegas trip, according to a news release they shared with local police last week.
“Our family is praying [for] our beloved Reatha May and that she returns safely,” Finkbonner’s aunt, Nikki Finkbonner, said in the release, adding that her niece has two kids.
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The Lummi Nation Police Department and the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department are now probing the mysterious disappearance after her family filed reports that she was missing. Finkbonner also appeared on a missing Indigenous persons list published on Monday by the Washington State Patrol.
According to the release provided by her family, Reatha Finkbonner appeared to make attempts to contact her fiancé and friends through Facebook at least four times between roughly 1:30 and 5:00 p.m. on the day she was last seen. Facebook Messenger shows missed calls from Finkbonner at 1:34 p.m., 1:37 p.m., 1:41 p.m., and 5:05 p.m. on Sept. 3, Finkbonner’s aunt said.
According to her family, an unidentified woman whose phone Finkbonner had borrowed appeared to be the last person with whom she had contact. Their interaction took place on the sidewalk outside of a hotel soon before she went missing.
“From what our family has learned, the lady [whose phone she’d used] stated that a black vehicle pulled up to her, gave her a mask, and handed her something,” Nikki Finkbonner said of the interaction between her niece and the woman outside of the Bridger Inn Motel. “The lady mentioned that Reatha really needed to ‘reach them badly.’”
