Article Taken From The Mercury News online

Police, volunteers scour hills for missing mom
By William Brand

OAKLAND - Search and rescue teams, using dogs, horses and even mules from around the Bay Area, spent all day Saturday searching the rugged hills and steep canyons of the Oakland hills for Nina Reiser, the 31-year-old mother of two young children who has been missing since Sept. 3.

Oakland police spokesman Officer Roland Holmgren said police have no new information that indicates her body may be somewhere in the hills. The search, he said, was a logical step, an effort to find any kind of clue involving the missing woman. Her abandoned car, with groceries still inside from Berkeley Bowl, was found Sept. 9 on a street in Montclair, about two miles from the spot where the search was taking place.

Meanwhile, friends of the missing woman said they plan to search the hills today. They will focus on Robert Sibley Regional Preserve and other area parks. Volunteers are asked to meet at Montclair Park on Mountain Boulevard at 1 p.m.

The search Saturday was massive and painstaking, conducted by veteran law officers, and trained search and rescue volunteer teams. Police said about 150 people were involved. The parking lot at the East Bay Regional Park District headquarters was jammed with rescue vehicles, police command vehicles and even a Salvation Army lunch wagon Saturday morning.

Search organizers handed out two-way radios, GPS-positioning equipment and topographic maps with each search quadrant marked. By 8 a.m., with wisps of fog still lacing the Bay flatlands far below, search teams set out.

"This is the biggest search I've seen of the Oakland hills since Bibi Lee," said Alameda County Sheriff's Sgt. J.D. Nelson.

Roberta "Bibi" Lee was a University of California, Berkeley, student who disappeared on an Oakland hills hiking trail. Her boyfriend, Bradley Page, weeks later confessed to her murder.

Oakland police investigators emphasize that they have no reason to suspect someone killed Nina Reiser. "She is a person of interest who had disappeared," Holmgren said. She was last heard from when she told a friend she was dropping her children, ages 5 and 6, at her estranged husband's Montclair home on Sept. 3.

The search Saturday was difficult. Just a few yards from Park District headquarters, the terrain sloped down into a steep canyon, choked with chaparral and poison oak. One team of searchers from the Contra Costa County Sheriff's office headed by Andrew Schultz slowly moved up Skyline Drive, checking their assigned area within 300 feet of Skyline.

Their dog, a rangy, Labrador retriever, ran quickly through the grass, stopping occasionally to take deep sniffs at piles of brush. At one point, Schultz asked team members to check a fresh dirt mound, 10 feet from the street.

A searcher stuck a sharp probe into the pile, turned it over. There was nothing.

And so it went, slowly, foot by foot -- all across the hills' wildlands.

MCSO SAR Unit Mission Summary (mission 06-24)