“There’s not closure because we don’t really know what’s going on,” a relative said.
On the day before Christmas Eve last year, Olivia Gonzalez, 20, and Brian Fernandez, 21, decided to take a weekend trip to Big Sur—a gorgeous segment of California along the Pacific Coast Highway where the mountains meet the sea.
Oxygen wrote about the couple last year, but as part of our new missing person’s series, which we are launching in conjunction with our new show Three Days to Live, we followed up with the Los Angeles Police Department about the case, in which a young couple and their two dogs seemed to vanish into thin air.
In early January, police found the remains of Gonzalez and the one of the dogs near her wrecked vehicle 325 below the coast highway, near the ocean, reportedThe Los Angeles Times. The body of a second dog was found a few days later, according to the Los Angeles Daily News.
But Fernandez, who wasn’t in the wrecked vehicle, is still missing. “It’s possible he was ejected into the water,” said Tony Cipolla, a spokesman for the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff’s Department, to the LA Times. Authorities announced they had finished the search for Fernandez on Jan. 20, without locating his body.
Oxygen asked the LAPD if a coroner had concluded that Gonzalez’s death was due to the car crash, or if Fernandez had been located—even if any of his clothes washed ashore. “There is no updated information at this time,” said police spokesman Drake Madison.
A call to Cipolla has not yet been returned.
Vanessa Guzman, Gonzalez’s sister, told a local outlet when Gonzalez and Fernandez first went missing that the pair had a rocky relationship. Still, Cipolla told the LA Times that no foul play is expected in the case.
Knowing that isn’t enough for Gonzalez’s family, however.
“There’s not closure because we don’t really know what’s going on,” Guzman told the Daily News.