A Georgia woman who vanished without a trace last August has been confirmed dead after her skeletal remains were found 100 miles from home in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
The Cobb County Sheriff’s Office said this week that the remains of Maury-Ange Faith Martinez, 20, of Alpharetta, were positively identified by the Hamilton County Medical Examiner’s office.
Martinez was reported missing from Gwinnett County, northeast of Atlanta, on Aug. 28, according to police.
Her remains were found by the side of a road in a rural area near the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga on Jan. 5, the Chattanooga Times Free press reported.
However, it took weeks to confirm that the remains belonged to Martinez.
She would have turned 21 on Monday.
“She was a charismatic, magnetic, sparkling, fun, loving person,” Martinez’ heartbroken mother, Anita Darling, recalled to Local 3 News.
Darling said that she was less than ten minutes away from picking up her daughter from near the courthouse in Atlanta the day she went missing.
“I was on the way to pick her up, and she called me and told me she had caught a ride,” she told the outlet. Her daughter stopped responding to her texts afterwards.
Martinez did not know the man she had gotten in the car with, Darling said.
“I had a conversation with her about it, it still seemed strange. I got off the phone with her and felt uneasy about it,” she said.
She said she received a phone call last month from authorities who said they believed the remains belonged to her daughter.
“You are totally torn apart,” Darling said. “Then, there is the heartbreak of realizing you lost your child. My kids are like my everything. It was horrible. It was huge.”
It’s not clear how Martinez died and her death remains under investigation, cops said.
There were no signs of trauma or major injury before death, authorities said.
Police said that her last known location was in an unincorporated area of Cobb County and have asked anyone with information to come forward.
Darling said the family plans to donate Martinez’s remains for medical research.
