The family of Naomi Irion say they believe she’s still alive and plan to continue more searches – as authorities begged people to stop sharing fake social media posts of the teen’s rescue.
Photos were circulating through social media after the arrest of Troy Driver, 41, who will have a bail hearing on Wednesday on kidnapping charges related to the 12 March disappearance of Ms Irion, 18. She was waiting for a shuttle to her job at Panasonic when surveillance video she was approached in a Fernley, Nevada Walmart parking lot by a hooded man who got into the car with her and drove off.
Her car was later found abandoned but there has been no trace of her since.
Mr Driver, a Fallon resident who’d previously been given a 15-year sentence for murder, was arrested on 25 March, the Lyon County Sheriff’s Office said in a release.
The department then pleaded on Facebook for people not to believe or circulate false images about the fate of Ms Irion.
The authorities shared screen shots of tweets that claimed the 18-year-old was “FOUND in an abandoned home in Reno, Nevada. Being brought to the hospital.”
Accompanying Twitter photos showed a woman on a stretcher being loaded into an ambulance.
User @thuggyocean12 tweeted that their “friend on facebook is following the ambulance. will try to get more pics.”
While sharing the tweets over the weekend, the sheriff’s office wrote on Facebook: “These posts are NOT accurate. Please do not share them. Naomi has not been located yet and these just hinder the search efforts.”
Those efforts were briefly paused on Monday, Ms Irion’s brother said on Facebook, after a social media user posted videos claiming he’d worked with Mr Driver at Ledcor, noticed strange behaviour around the time of the teenager’s disappearance, and was fired from the company after speaking to the FBI about his former mentor.
In the videos, he claimed Mr Driver had deliberately spent time alone in remote areas in the surrounding days and could have dumped evidence in the region’s mines.
Neither Ledcor nor the alleged employee immediately responded to interview requests from The Independent on Tuesday.
But Ms Irion’s brother, Casey Valley – who shared a home with her and was the first to raise the alarm when she vanished – wrote on Facebook: “For everyone’s information, we did put the search on hold for a short time yesterday.
“As of this moment the Search is still on. We are still planning on searching between Fernley and Fallon. The exact areas are still to be determined. The exact rally point is still to be determined.
“And we are in a very fluid situation. This could change again at any moment. The reason why we put it on hold was so that we could process the video that came out yesterday and discuss it with interested parties.
“We don’t have any reason to believe that Naomi is not alive. And we have no reason to believe that there isn’t any evidence between Fernley and Fallon.
“Please be patient with us. #FindNaomiIrion.”
The bail hearing for Mr Driver will be held Wednesday at noon, the sheriff’s office said in a release.
