BILLINGS — The disappearance of a 16-year-old girl at a Montana rest area is beginning to look suspicious, a sheriff said.
Selena Shelley Faye Not Afraid was last seen Wednesday afternoon at the eastbound Interstate 90 rest area between Billings and Hardin. A search began that evening.
The search entered a third day Friday, with people covering an up to 4-mile (6-kilometer) area on foot, horseback and all-terrain vehicles.
“We’re not going to give up searching,” Bighorn County Sheriff Lawrence Big Hair said Friday while stressing the need to explore other avenues including widening the search to Billings.
The disappearance is “beginning to look suspicious,” Big Hair said.
Selena’s twin sister, Zoey Not Afraid, 11, took her own life in Billings in 2014. The middle-schooler was the youngest person in at least a decade to die by suicide in Montana, the Billings Gazette reports.
Selena Not Afraid was among six people driving from Billings to Hardin when the car broke down and restarted, sheriff’s officials said.
Four people left the rest stop in the vehicle and the driver called a relative to pick up Not Afraid and another girl left behind.
Only one girl was at the rest stop when the relative arrived. Not Afraid had walked off into a nearby field. She was insufficiently dressed for temperatures around freezing.
Not Afraid has black hair and brown eyes and was last seen wearing a black coat, gray sweater, blue jeans and gray ankle boots.