Murder of Michelle Le

Michelle Hoang Thi Le was a 26-year-old Vietnamese-American nursing student who disappeared on May 27, 2011, from the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in the San Francisco Bay Area city of Hayward, California.

Biography

Le grew up in San Diego County and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area for college and nursing school at Samuel Merritt University in Oakland, California.

Investigation

Le's car was found the morning after her disappearance around 9 am parked on Ponderosa Court, about half a mile from the medical center.

Her family put up billboards and offered a $65,000 reward for information about her whereabouts. Over the next four months, at least eight volunteer search efforts were undertaken, some organized by the Klaas Kids Foundation, founded by Marc Klaas, after his daughter Polly was kidnapped and murdered in 1993.

A variety of missing persons organizations joined in the searches. The eighth search found decomposed human remains in a remote canyon area on September 17. On September 19, 2011, the Alameda County coroner's office positively identified the remains to be those of Michelle Le.