The Los Angeles Police Department believes that missing aspiring model Adea Shabani may have been murdered.
The LAPD has stated that they believe the missing 25-year-old aspiring actress from Macedonia to be a murder victim after nearly a month has gone by since her disappearance.
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The announcement came just a day before the Nevada County Sheriff’s Office and their coroner’s division discovered the human remains of a woman buried in a shallow grave in the Spenceville Wildlife Area in Penn Valley, California, about 430 miles away from where she was last seen in Los Angeles, California on Feb 23.
According to detectives with the LAPD, investigators received information that led them to the shallow grave, where they discovered the human remains of a young woman, though they have not yet positively identified the remains as those of Shabani.
“At this point in time, we believe that those remains are the body of Miss. Adea Shabani,” a spokesperson for the Los Angeles Police Department told reporters during a press conference on Tuesday. “We cannot say that conclusively at this point in time because the condition of the remains prohibited positive identification,” he continued, adding that they believed Shabani’s boyfriend, Christopher Spotz, was “somehow involved in her death.”
Spotz initially told authorities that he and Shabani had traveled to Northern California but they had gotten into an argument and he had dropped the 25-year-old off on the side of the freeway. Investigators were not able to corroborate his statement, ABC 7 reports.
The search for Shabani intensified after Spotz, 33, led police on a chase east of Los Angeles after they attempted to pull him over and took his own life at some point during the stand-off.
Authorities have not yet released any information on a possible motive.
While police were unable to make an immediate identification of the body found, they stated that an autopsy was scheduled for Wednesday to determine the victim’s identity and cause and manner of death.
