Sixteen-year-old Kiely Rodni vanished from a party at a California campground just after midnight on August 6, 2022.
The party was a high school graduation affair attended by 200 to 300 minors at the Prosser Family Campground, a National Forest recreation site on the Prosser Creek Reservoir near Truckee, California. There’s a boat ramp about half a mile away.
There was socializing, dancing, drinking and drugs. Rodni was last seen around 12:30 a.m., about 15 minutes after texting her mother than she would be “heading home soon.” Her phone stopped pinging 3 minutes later, and neither she nor her car were seen again.
Her disappearance made national news, and sparked a massive search involving many volunteers, many of them teens, which turned up nothing. It was if she had vanished into thin air, and authorities feared she might never be found. Police treated the case as a potential abduction. The FBI got involved.
One of Rodni’s friends “told Fox News she’d been ‘partying’ with Rodni, and Rodni was too drunk to drive home. She thought Rodni was going to stay the night at the campground instead.”
In retrospect, that clue might have led searchers straight to her. A volunteer dive team using sonar found her body in her car, upside down in 14 feet of water, in the Prosser Creek Reservoir just a “few hundred yards” from the campground two weeks later, on Sunday, August 21, 2022.
It’s not hard at all to figure out how she got there. She drove into the lake.
This wasn’t a suicide, nor foul play. It was pitch-dark, she was drunk, and driving on unmarked roads. She got lost in the dark, took a wrong turn onto the boat ramp (photo), and thinking it was the road out of the campground, drove into the water.
Or, alternatively, she never made it out of the campground and drove into the lake there, too drunk to find the road; although given the large number of people present, someone should’ve heard a splash. But that would explain why her phone stopped pinging so quickly, which would’ve happened when it went underwater.
The car wouldn’t sink right away. It would gradually fill with water. This being a reservoir, it probably has a water current, carrying the car out from shore, and it likely drifted a distance before the weight of water in the interior capsized and sank it.
Escaping from a car in water is counterintuitive. If the windows are closed, water pressure will make it impossible to open the car door. What you must do is take a deep breath, roll down the window, wait for the car to fill with water, then climb out through the window or push the door open, and swim to the surface. Then you have to get to shore. Most people in a state of panic won’t think of that even if they’re sober. The chances of a drunken, panicky person thinking to do this are … well, you figure out the odds.