The Utah Department of Public Safety Dive Team is being credited with helping to locate the body of a Colorado woman who was reported missing 7 years ago and is believed to be a homicide victim.
The Rio Grand County Sheriff's Office in western Colorado contacted Utah's dive team last week for help in the search of 19-year-old Danice Day, who disappeared Jan. 9, 2002 from Monte Vista, Colo., said Jeff Nigbur, a spokesman for the Utah Department of Public Safety.
Day, a mother of two who was a waitress, went home after work on the afternoon of Jan. 9 and told her boyfriend she was going out with a friend. That was the last time the woman was seen, according to a Web site maintained by the woman's family, www.daniceday.com.
No one has ever been arrested in connection with Day's disappearance, the Web site states.
The case puzzled investigators, who had struck out on several leads over the years, according to the Web site, which includes a compilation of news coverage about the search for Day.
Utah's dive team traveled with the Rio Grand County Sheriff's Office to Lyman Lake State Park in Arizona, where human remains believe to be the woman's were located in a lake Friday.
Information about how the authorities tracked the case to Arizona wasn't immediately available.
Utah divers donated high-tech equipment to the search that helped to locate the woman's remains in the water, Nigbur said.
The woman's sister told The Valley Courier newspaper in Alamosa, Colo. that Day's family is grateful it appears her body has been found after so many years.
The remains will undergo DNA testing to confirm they are Day, but sheriff's deputies told the newspaper they are confident Day has been found.
"We have had so many false leads," Jacqui Flint, the woman's sister, told the newspaper. "We are pretty sure this time. We continually prayed that there would be closure, and this has led us closer to that closure we have wanted for so long."
