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California sisters missing for 36 years found alive as search shifts to mother's killer New Foto - California sisters missing for 36 years found alive as search shifts to mother's killer

New Foto - California sisters missing for 36 years found alive as search shifts to mother's killer

Two California sisters missing for 36 years were found alive and well in their home state with the help of familial DNA, authorities investigating their case in Arizona said. When they were discovered in August, Jasmin and Elizabeth Ramos were living under new names given by foster parents who raised them in Ventura County, California, unaware of their missing status. Now authorities want to find the killer of their mother, Marina Ramos of Bakersfield, California, whose body was found with multiple stab wounds in Mohave County, Arizona, on Dec. 12, 1989, the local sheriff's office said. Jasmin was 2 months old and Elizabeth was 14 months old when they went missing that month and were found days later abandoned in an Oxnard, California, park bathroom, the Mohave County Sheriff's Office said in a Sept. 22Facebook post. "A witness walking in the area heard children crying in the women's restroom," the office said. "He asked a woman to check the bathroom, and she found the girls laying on the wet floor with no adult nearby." At the time, authorities didn't make the connection between the girls and the killed woman. "The girls were eventually adopted by a couple in Ventura County and were raised together in a loving home," the Mohave County Sheriff's Office said. The office's Special Investigations Unit, established in 2019 to revive cold cases, reopened the Ramos file at a time when the slain victim was still unidentified, her girls were considered missing and there were no suspect leads, the sheriff's office said. In 2022, fingerprints from Marina Ramos' body matched those on file belonging to a woman named Maria Ortiz, who had been arrested and fingerprinted following allegations of shoplifting in Kern County, California, in June 1989, the Mohave County Sheriff's Office said. A Bakersfield address for Ortiz led investigators to a roommate, who said she had a cousin named Marina Ramos who had been missing since 1989, the office said. "It was later learned that Maria Ortiz was an alias used by Marina Ramos," the office said. Investigators also discovered that Ortiz had two young daughters who remained missing. Mohave County Sheriff's Office investigators, led by Lori Miller, a former Los Angeles Police Department detective, got a DNA sample from a relative of Marina Ramos and used law enforcement and family DNA databases in hopes of finding the girls, the office said. They discovered one of the sisters, who said the pair had been abandoned in 1989, the sheriff's office said. The other sister kept newspaper clippings that contained news of the abandonment, it said. While the sheriff's office in Arizona celebrated the discovery, calling Miller's feat"unbelievable work,"a key portion of the case remains unsolved: who killed Marina Ramos? "The search for the suspects involved in the homicide of Marina Ramos continues," the Mohave County Sheriff's Office said. The office said a witness reported seeing Marina Ramos with two men and her daughters at the Oxnard park where the girls were abandoned, and that the five were also seen in a compact, black pickup. Investigators hope that observation might jog someone's memory and help authorities track down Marina Ramos' killers. Anyone with information was urged to contact the Mohave County Sheriff's Office.