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07-30-2026, 04:32 PM
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The Murder of Adrienne Salinas
She was three blocks from her own front door, in a neighborhood she knew, at five in the morning. A cab was already on its way to collect her. Adrienne Salinas had a phone in her hand and a destination in mind, and then there is nothing. Who she was Adrienne Celeste Salinas was 19 and living in Tempe, Arizona, where she was attending community college. She shared an apartment near 5th Street and Hardy Drive with roommates, the kind of place a lot of nineteen year olds in a college town end up in. On the night of June 14, 2013, she and her roommates threw a birthday party for a friend at the apartment. Nothing about the night was unusual until it stopped making sense. The last two hours The FBI account of what happened is unusually precise, because so much of it is reconstructable from phone records and from people who saw her. Salinas left the party at some point in the early hours of June 15, then came back and spoke briefly with a roommate. At about 4:00 a.m. she was seen leaving again. A few minutes after that, her car was involved in a single vehicle accident a short distance from the apartment. She was not hurt badly enough to stay with the car. She walked back to the apartment, unseen, and changed her clothes. At around 5:00 a.m. she sent a text message to her boyfriend saying she was coming to his place. Then she called a cab. She spoke to the cab driver on the phone. He confirmed he was on his way, and that he would pick her up at a convenience store close to the apartment, a walk of about a quarter mile. Shortly after that the driver arrived and could not find her. He tried to call. Later attempts to reach her phone went straight to voice mail. That is the whole window. A crash, a walk home, a change of clothes, a text, a phone call, and a short walk to a convenience store that she may never have completed. Everything that happened to Adrienne Salinas happened inside a few residential blocks, in the space of roughly an hour, in a place where she was not a stranger. She was reported missing on June 16, 2013, which was Father's Day, after family and friends could not locate her. Local reporting says her father called police when she did not appear for the holiday. Apache Junction On August 6, 2013, two weeks after a substantial storm and flooding in the area, her remains were found in a desert wash basin behind a residence in Apache Junction, Arizona. A homeowner in the area came across them. The Arizona Department of Public Safety laboratory confirmed the identification. Apache Junction sits roughly 30 miles from the block she disappeared from. Whoever took her covered that distance. The wash where she was found is the kind of ground that moves in a storm, which is very likely why she was found at all, and also why so little was left to work with by the time she was. The phone The detail that has followed this case for more than a decade is a piece of evidence that the police had and then did not have. According to a Tempe police report, officers found a BlackBerry cell phone and a notebook sitting in the driver's seat of Adrienne's crashed car. They photographed the phone. The car was then released to her family rather than impounded. A full day later, a Tempe detective realized the car had never been taken in. When it was finally towed and searched properly, the police report records that the phone and the notebook were no longer in the car. The phone is the single object most likely to say who she called, who called her, and where the device went after she stopped answering it. Investigators have said openly that it could hold the answer. It has never been recovered. The cab driver, for what it is worth, was cleared and has never been treated as a suspect. A Tempe detective told 12 News he would still like to have a few more conversations with him, which is a fair reflection of where this case sits: not a lack of leads exactly, but a lack of anything that closes. Where it stands The investigation is run jointly by the Tempe Police Department and the FBI. In more than a decade, no suspect has ever been publicly identified. There is no named person of interest, no arrest, no charge. The FBI has an open seeking information notice and is offering a reward reported at up to 20,000 dollars for information leading to the identification, arrest and conviction of whoever is responsible. What is striking about the Salinas case is how small the unknown is. This is not a woman who vanished on a highway or in a city she did not know. The distance between the last confirmed contact and the convenience store was a few minutes on foot. Somebody crossed that gap with her. Anyone with information can contact the FBI at 1-800-CALL-FBI or submit a tip at tips.fbi.gov, or contact the Tempe Police Department directly.
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