OXNARD : Search Under Way for Missing Woman

A former Ventura woman, last seen leaving an Oxnard party two days after Thanksgiving, is the subject of an intensive search across Ventura and Los Angeles counties.

Family members are passing out flyers announcing the potential abduction of 20-year-old Trina Montgomery of Westchester, a Santa Monica College student who attended Ventura High School in the late 1980s.

Aside from the discovery, several hours after she disappeared, of her blue Toyota pickup, stained with blood, and abandoned in a remote canyon at the foot of Angeles National Forest, there have been few clues about Montgomery’s disappearance.

Her mother, Katy Montgomery, has made television pleas to anyone who might know what happened to her daughter.

“It’s really hard to keep hoping and praying and waiting,” Montgomery said Wednesday in a telephone interview from her Westchester home. “The hardest part is that nobody knows what happened, or if they know they aren’t saying.”

Montgomery, who lived in Ventura until 1990, last saw her daughter Thanksgiving night. The next day, Trina left her parents’ Westchester home early in the morning for her job as a waitress at Jerry’s Famous Deli in Marina Del Rey and later went to visit a friend in Santa Barbara.

She ended up at the Oxnard party that night and was last seen between 4:30 and 5:30 a.m. Saturday. Hikers found her truck that afternoon in the Little Tujunga Canyon, north of the Foothill Freeway near San Fernando.

A small amount of blood discovered inside the truck bed has not been identified as coming from Trina. Search-and-rescue teams have scoured the rugged canyon to no avail.

Katy Montgomery said no one seems to know whether her daughter left the party alone, or even whether she drove her own vehicle when she left.

“That’s the mystery,” she said. “That’s what keeps us up at night.”

Trina Montgomery is 5 feet, 3 inches tall and weighs about 125 pounds. She has waist-length red hair, brown eyes and was last seen wearing jean overalls, a white T-shirt and white high-top basketball shoes.

Anyone with information about her whereabouts is asked to call Los Angeles police at 213-485-2531 or 213-485-5381. A special number for anonymous callers has been set up at 310-301-2719.