I think they should have found Tanya sooner because if she was stuck in her car for days and she is hurt the matter can get worse.

I think the police's first response was to suspect the spouse, and this is an unfair assumption that now has cost a big price for this decent loving innocent couple.

She had a new job, a new car, a new home, and a new route to travel at night home from work.

All it would take would be a very quick immediete fist step to check the cell phone and save many police and family and friend man hours of searching and hours and days of heartache and grief. The husband made his life an open book to the officials voluntarily.

Because he used their joints financial accounts they discounted him/her as a runaway situation? The first day this was reported the police said missing persons were almost always two things and one was the very young abducted by a noncustodial parent and the other was alzeimers.

Give them a break and an APOLOGY !!!!!
This was an error on the part of the officials this time.

"Sometimes" it is the family that are rightfully suspect but not always and definately not in the case of this decent loving couple.

Police should have found, in a cursory check, that there was no high risk of foul play (within the first couple of days maximum) and went searching for clues to the womans whereabouts! Her cell phone records and her route home from work being checked for clues to an accident would be a first action I would think! There have been numerous cases in this State of just such "off the road" injured and trapped, or lost and disabled families and persons! Whatever laws tied the authorities hands need to be changed, ASAP!!!!

This husband was told that because his wife is an adult they could not treat her as a missing person, I find it criminal that simply because she is an adult she was neglected by the officers. The officers stated that because they saw financial activity on her account they assumed she was "a voluntarilly missing person". Frequently a transaction can take three days to post to my account, perhaps this is because i bank with a small credit union. I would hate to think because of my choice of financial institution I could lay dying in a ditch for days.

I drive 3500 to 4000 miles a month for my job. frequently in rural areas with no cell reception. I am a health care provider and know that others rely on me for appropriate and timely medical care. Laws and pollicies that leave people, tax payers, woman at risk for dehydration, limb loss and death need to be changed. Please put as much time and effort into finding me as you put into providing health care for illegal immigrants.

The police are just making excuses for botching the search for Tanya.She should have been found and rescued shortly after her disappearance. The roadside brush was still obvious that there had been a disturbance there, even after a week so why wasn't that spot searched at the first sighting of it? They were too interested in placing blame on the husband and less concerned with their own job of searching the obvious. Disgraceful

If 8 days at the bottom of the ravine, dying, is the best that King County police policy can provide to it's citizens - then we need to step back and take a fresh, close look at how we are being treated by the people whom we pay to serve us. How difficult could it be, to have run that cell tower ping test at the very first phone call, when the husband tried to report her missing? At least find her and see if she is voluntarily absent - it's called a welfare check. Why wasn't that done BEFORE we started searching his home, and spending manhours and $ on a criminal case? Why not check the obvious, first? Sue Rahr - I'm disappointed, if this is indeed the best this department can do. Something needs to be changed here - and quickly. By tomorrow, would be good. And I do NOT want to hear any more from the Bellevue Police, about "not in my jurisdiction." The Puget Sound area is not so large, that we can afford jurisidictional hand washing and just turning away from cases. If the police departments cannot learn to work together - as separate entities - then do we need to do away with all of the little departments, and have one cohesive department for the larger combined metropolitan area? Across city and county lines, that could share information and learn how to work cooperatively? Makes sense, if we can't learn to work together any other way.

Think all organizations need to look back at this and check their own operating procedures to prevent this from possibly happening else where.

I Think King County police owes a PUBLIC APOLOGY

Absolutly! DUH!

It was a long shot that led to Tanya Rider’s dramatic rescue, “pinging” her cell phone to narrow the search. The technique gave investigators a five-mile radius to look in. There is a service, called EmergencyTrack, www.emergencytrack.com ,that could have prevented all of this from happening. They offer a personal GPS tracking device, along with a 24/7 service and web tracking. If she had an EmergencyTrack device, it would have taken minutes, not days to locate her, and it would be a matter of feet, not miles. People need to realize that there is technology out there that can not only make life more fun, but save a life in an emergency situation.

Yes, the police should have started looking for her much earlier. All they had to do was trace the cell phone signal--how hard would it have been to do that the next day? It's a shame that the police's knee-jerk suspicion of her husband combined with bureaucracy that delayed the search almost cost this woman her life. And her husband, already distraught over his wife's disappearance, had to deal with being treated like a suspect! This whole thing is disillusioning and disappointing.

What would the response of the police have been if the missing woman had been the wife of the police chief, the mayor, or a celebrity?? It's a no-brainer. We all know what the response would have been.

I wonder why the husband took 3 days to contact police? After working for years as a married person there was not a day that went by that I didn't talk to my wife no matter what shift we were on. What if the wife in this case had left home because of an issue that had ocurred between the husband and wife? Could he use the poice to locate his wife? This is a delicate issue for the police. Actually seeing that the police located her in the short amount of time that they did was good. It is a very sad caser that the Riders were the victim of these circumstances. We cannot have privacy issues both ways.

Of course they should have searched for her sooner. If they had 'pinged' her cell phone earlier and found her, and if she had, in fact, gone *missing* voluntarily, what would be the harm? They're not duty-bound to tell her husband, or anyone, *where* she is - and she would have been found days and days earlier. Imagine that - no kidney failure, no medically induced coma. How about a public policy that allows for the possibility of innocent solutions (she's honestly lost) instead of only, always, automatically assuming the worst (she's dead at her spouse's hands)?

A blunt failure from police who now try to pass the blame game on. In my opinion someone should get axed for failing to serve the public. We pay your salary .. you serve us .. in this case you screwed up .. big time.

I agree with Lisa Rodriguez, the missing person laws and policy which guide state and federal law enforcement officers is not applied equally. For average americans, law enforcement seems to assume a crime has been committed, but for famous people like John Kennedy, Jr. and Steve Fossett its practically a given that an accident must have happened and all forms of infrastructure is thrown behind an immediate search. Then, as in this case, when an honest citizen is proved above board and honest, the law enforcement departments shamelessly hide behind "policy."

I think the King County should be held liable for all of Tanya Riders medical expenses, financial loss, and pay punitive damages for the King County Police Department negligence.

If there is one thing I have learned in the 15 years I have lived in the Pacific Northwest is that law enforcement here is a bitter joke. Here in Tacoma they won't even come out if your car was broken into they just give you a case number over the phone and never bother to try to catch the perpetrator. And when there is an emergency, well, you'd better figure out how to deal with it yourself, because you won't see a police officer in less than 30 minutes. The police are great at giving out traffic tickets (revenue gathering), but when you really need a police officer, you're completely out of luck. I haven't seen or heard anything that makes me think that police in any other Washington community is any better.

All the law enforcement agencies involved with this case should not only apologize but be retrained. Their flat refusal to search for this woman until they had built a murder case against her husband was inexcusable. This poor woman may die because she had to sit injured and alone for over a week while law enforcement harassed her husband.

Obviously the King County police department deserves to be, and likely will be sued over this. I'm not a big fan of suits which eventually cost the tax payers money, but in this case, they've done real damage. On the same token, if this woman dies, criminal charges should be brought against those who mishandled this, in my opinion. God knows they would be if a private party essentially caused a death in a similar manor.

I notice that the traffic stings are "hot and heavy" around the metro areas...lot's of police manpower out there on the roads. It's much easier (and certainly more profitable) to go after the everyday law-abiding Joe or Jane who might be exceeding the speed limit than to actually do real police work like crime prevention, investigating missing persons "in a reasonable manner," and solving crimes that have already happened. Therefore, when a "real" police case pops up, like a missing person, it is put on the back burner. The people who work the "911" network are poorly trained, low-prioritized by many law agencies, and understaffed, too. Technology? That's something the law enforcement agencies have no clue about...unless it's the Feds and you "look like" a terrorist! There have been so many of these flawed missing persons cases lately, starting with the Kims (in Oregon) last fall/winter, the priest and his traveling companion (also in Oregon), and now this poor lady, mainly because the law agencies were fighting over jurisdiction and ignoring technology (i.e. cell phone pinging for locale). It is definitely time for the law enforcement community to wake up and smell the coffee. It's 2007, folks, and you really need to modernize your operation, solve this stupid jurisdiction haggling, and SERVE THE PUBLIC (not just the so-called "Privileged") whom you work for. Of course, Tanya has a lawsuit...and we all pay for the outcome, both in money and in frustration over the incompetence shown by the law enforcement agencies.

We live in an age when nearly everyone has a cell phone and it serves a lot of useful purposes other than conversations. It is a handy emergency device for everyone to have when they are anywhere from a hike hopefully where they can pick up a signal to a boat ride to going to work or walking home from school. This could be a learning tool for officials that it could be a quick first response to check the cell phone if it is on before the battery runs down, where they might locate someone that is legitimately missing for some reason. Time for officials to catch up with and make use of technology.
And the poor husband is getting such a bad rap by the newscasters using rhetoric how he is balsting them? that is appaling. How should he feel and handle it and what should his emotions be to be appropriate? I would anger is very appropriate over the suffering needlessly caused by the delay in the search for his wife. I think the newscasters could use a slap on the hand for the way they reference him too.

They could have run 2 pings in a 24 hour frame and noticed that the phone hadn't moved.

My Verizon Wireless phone records, on my phone, all 'recent calls dialed'. Does her phone not have this capability? This should prove whether she made the call or tried to make the call.....as she said she did.

I think the police is doing a fine job in locating her. Nobody nor the husband found her location and people should not assumed it's the police fault. I think the husband is not telling us the real truth. Why did the husband took three days to report her missing?

Both she and her husband work 2 jobs and apperantly only see eachother on the weekends. Remember the all out search that happened for Steve Fosset instantaniously .. things are different when you are rich and famous.