Skeletal remains found near Nevada hiking trail identified as missing girl Jawaher Hejji. Cause of death yet to be determined.
Skeletal remains found near a hiking trail on a Nevada mountain last month have been identified as belonging to a woman who went missing almost a year ago, police said Wednesday.
The remains were found near Black Mountain, near Las Vegas, on September 6, police said. Black Mountain is a 6.8-mile out-and-back trail in Henderson, about 17 miles southeast of Las Vegas.
Yesterday, the bones were identified by a coroner as belonging to 26-year-old Jawaher Hejji. Her cause of death has not yet been released.
Hejji was reported missing by her family last Christmas, after they hadn’t seen or heard from her in three days.
Her vehicle was found by the Henderson Police Department at Shaded Canyon Drive south of Horizon Ridge Parkway.
Questions surround missing woman remains discovery
The woman’s keys were on the hood of the car, and her phone and wallet were found inside, according to the Las Vegas Review Journal.
Heijji was last seen alive in surveillance footage obtained by Las Vegas police walking along the Armargosa Trail near the base of the mountain on December 23.
Heijji’s mother told FOX5 Las Vegas that a climber found her daughter’s skull before the rest of her remains were uncovered elsewhere on the mountain.
The mother said she was upset with how the Las Vegas Metro Police handled her daughter’s disappearance, and said they ‘didn’t do their job.’
She told the Review Journal that they refused to share surveillance footage with her, and denied her request that they involve the FBI in the search.
‘If they searched and if they did their job, they should have found my daughter, maybe alive,’ she said.
‘They found her in the mountain in the same area, and we were told they searched the whole mountain with the K-9 dog and everything.
‘How did we miss it?’
‘Ten months, now you just bring me bones. They didn’t do the right job, they didn’t care about this case, they didn’t take seriously like the other cases.’
Nichole Grossman, who searched for Heijji with her family over seven months, thought that the young woman’s body would have been found earlier if more people joined search efforts.
‘How did we miss it?’ Grossman told FOX5. ‘We were here every single day for the first month – day in, day out, just looking for any sign of her.”‘
In the following months, investigators joined Heijji’s family members and friends in the search for the 26-year-old who had vanished without a trace.
‘She was a happy person,’ her sister, Rowda Haggy told KSNV in April. ‘She loved her family a lot, especially my mom. She would never just leave my mom like that. Not me, my sister, especially my mom. She would never leave her like that.’
Haggy believes her sister’s remains may have been dumped on the mountain after the search was finished.
‘It doesn’t seem right that she was found where we were looking.’
She told KLAS-TV: ‘To me, it doesn’t seem right that she was found where we were looking.’
‘I feel like somebody did something and brought her back, but it’s like so many different scenarios. We don’t know what happened.’
‘They were saying that she was found in a place that it was hard to find, but how come the K-9 dogs didn’t go down there? It just doesn’t make sense.’
The Clark County coroner’s office will release Hejji’s cause of death when available, according to the LVMPD.
