The FBI is assisting local authorities in the search for Miya Marcano, the Florida college student who has been missing for a week, the Orange County sheriff said.
Sheriff John Mina told reporters on Thursday that searchers are concentrating their efforts on Orange, Seminole and Volusia counties. More than 60 Orange County detectives are working full time on finding Marcano, a Valencia College sophomore who was last seen Sept. 24 at her home in the Arden Villas apartment complex in Orlando, about a mile from the University of Central Florida, he said.
Despite the manpower that's being employed, it will likely take more help from the public to find Marcano, who worked in the leasing office of the complex and would have been off her shift by about 5 p.m., according to the sheriff. She was supposed to fly home to Fort Lauderdale that day but missed the flight.
"We're coming up on the weekend now," Mina said Thursday. "We know that many people will be out and about, in outdoor areas, in waterways. We're asking them to keep their eyes open and call us if they see anything."
Investigators found that 27-year-old Armando Manuel Caballero, a maintenance worker at the complex who was found dead of an apparent suicide in Seminole County on Monday, had access to a master key, the sheriff said earlier this week. He used that key to let himself inside Marcano's unit at about 4:30 p.m, according to Mina.
Authorities originally described Caballero as a "person of interest" in the teen's disappearance. On Thursday, the sheriff called him "the prime suspect."
"So we believe that the suspect that we had named, Armando Caballero, is responsible. We don't know all the circumstances involved in what happened there," Mina said after he was asked if he believed Marcano had been kidnapped. "He was obviously the prime suspect."
Caballero had shown interest in Marcano, but she repeatedly rebuffed his romantic advances, according to authorities.
Mina said there's no evidence anyone else played a role in Marcano's disappearance.
"At this time we don't believe there is another person involved," he said. "These investigations constantly shift and change ... he was the main person we were focusing on."
