Nancy Salas was a former student of University of California, Los Angeles, but her family did not know she had dropped out of college in September 2008. Salas’s trouble began when she ran out of scholarship money and did not have good enough grades to obtain additional funds. Her plan was to return to UCLA the next semester, but she never got back in school and took up a job as a babysitter near campus and hung out in the area. Almost everyone she knew thought she was still attending UCLA, but when her graduation approached Salas panicked as her parents planned to throw a big celebration party in her honor. Instead of coming clean to her family about dropping out of UCLA, Salas faked her own kidnapping to avoid telling her family that she had not been attending UCLA for almost 2 years.
Salas turned up in Merced, California, last Thursday claiming to have been kidnapped by someone with a knife, which caused a frantic search in the area. Expenses from the incident were over $10,000 for the city of Merced, all because Salas hid this secret from her family. The very unfortunate part is that no criminal charges will be made by the Glendale police department near UCLA, so the taxpayers are the ones that now have to pay this bill, in a time when California is already in debt. There is still a possibility that Salas could face charges in Merced for filing a false police report, and Glendale is looking at other ways to recoup the money lost from this incident.
