IVAN JUAREZ, VICTIM`S FORMER ROOMMATE: I woke up to the news and it was just horrible. I ran out of my house. I vomited. I felt lost, you know.
[20:40:00] She lives the best life out of all of us. She lives in paradise and travels all over. We`re going to miss her, man.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KAREN CURTIS, NEWS DIRECTOR FOR WFTL RADIO: Very mysterious. The 4th was the last time that anyone saw Michelle Aranda, according to her Facebook post. She had a picture taken with her fellow employees and they were bowling. So then fast forward seven days to May 11th, that`s when police found her decomposing body in the Serenity on the River apartments, oddly enough. And then the vehicle, her vehicle is missing, the black mini cooper as you gave the tag.
Michelle is 28. She had gotten her pilot`s license last year. She was very adventurous. She had moved three years ago to Allapattah which is part of Miami. And she was doing very well. It is very, very suspicious. But the medical examiner so far has unclassified her death. We don`t know what she died from.
CASAREZ: So they can`t figure out a cause of death. Could be because of the decomposition at this point.
CURTIS: Right. Her car is not there and there is this seven-day gap between the last time she was seen and when they found the body. So the missing car and unclassified cause of death is very mysterious.
CASAREZ: Do we know, Karen, the last time she was seen alive at all?
CURTIS: May 4th which was when she was bowling with her fellow employees and coworkers.
CASAREZ: And that was a Facebook post, right?
CURTIS: On her Facebook, correct.
CASAREZ: So she doesn`t go to work for seven days, give or take a few days, but it`s her mother from Texas that actually called and reported her?
CURTIS: It`s the mother`s worst nightmare. She calls police, look, I haven`t heard from my daughter. It`s unlikely for her to not be in touch with me for seven days. It`s odd that no one from the Waste Management Company said, hey, she is not showing up for work and the last time we saw her was bowling. But the mother then got the call that yes, we found your daughter on the fourth floor in her apartment and she is deceased and badly decomposed.
CASAREZ: Danny Cevallos, what do you make of this, because they are not classifying the death, they are saying foul play. They can`t find a cause of death or they haven`t determined it yet. It`s unclassified. But her car is missing from the apartment complex. That could take different scenarios right there.
CEVALLOS: There are a couple different scenarios. This is a classic case if we need more information before we jump to conclusions. You could have the old separate case of a person deceased and then the car is sort of shoplifted out of the apartment where it was parked. But it would seem that this is certainly a lead, a missing car definitely creates sort of a wake of information with the prevalence of security video everywhere nowadays. It has to be a lead. But the fact that it still isn`t a homicide in this case, it really leaves a lot of open questions.
CASAREZ: Right. And Jeff Gold, if they had surveillance video of someone entering the apartment complex or if they have it on the floor inside her apartment, I mean, foul play. They would say there is foul play. They aren`t even saying that. But it seems to me the key here is the car. They got to find the car for the forensics that may be in there.
GOLD: Certainly. They may know more than they are saying because that is the only lead that they have. It`s unusual that they don`t have a cause of death, but may be with holding that, as well. They may want -- as Danny said, look, that car is all we have at the moment and they may want to keep a tight reign on the information that they let out so that this person stays in that car and that they can keep tracking this car. But who knows, right now there is really not enough information to smell like there is something rotten here.
CASAREZ: Karen, I don`t understand how no one called authorities saying that she was missing and further more at an apartment complex. Apartments
are pretty close together and if the smell was as foul as authorities are saying it was, I mean, why didn`t the manager of the apartment say something is wrong here, I got to go in. They have the right to go into an apartment.
CURTIS: Absolutely. It`s called the Serenity on the River apartments. She had taken plenty of Facebook photos of herself with the sunset behind her. She was very active and lively. And so you would think someone would have missed her. You know, police are asking for you to call crime stoppers if you have any information. Maybe they are fishing for more information. The medical examiner is having a hard time trying to determine the exact cause of death. Seven days is a pretty long time for a body to be lying there.
[20:45:00] Maybe the apartment was hot, I don`t know, but she was badly decomposed. So the foul smell should definitely been an indicator and they could smell it on the way into the apartment.
CASAREZ: And Karen, very quickly, do we know it all if there was forced entry into the apartment or if someone was invited in, for instance?
CURTIS: No, that hasn`t been released. We don`t know if there was forced entry and that would be a good question to ask the police because that would tell us something -- that foul play was there.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1705/15/ptab.01.html
