ABDUCTED MA IS HOME FREE
First look at Calif. kidnap victim
REDDING, Calif. — This is the first look at the California mom who vanished while jogging and then mysteriously reappeared on the side of a highway weeks later.
Sherri Papini looks like a shell of her former self after returning to her rural home with her family in Redding in the Sacramento Valley.
She was seen stepping outside her home Saturday in a white jacket with her husband, Keith, and two small children.
The family walked into their ga- rage together, and Sherri, 34, then came out with a small, red dish that she filled with water from a bottle. She placed the dish on the ground before going back inside the house.
Papini’s blond hair, which was reportedly chopped off by her captors, was tucked inside a baseball cap as she left the house.
Papini claimed she was abducted at gunpoint by two Hispanic women in a dark SUV while on a run near her home on Nov. 2.
She turned up Thanksgiving Day on the side of a highway in Yolo County about 150 miles away. Papini told cops that during her nearly three weeks in captivity, she was beaten, chained up and branded with a threatening message.
She was also nearly starved to death, losing 13 pounds while she was held captive, her husband has said in a statement.
The day Papini was released, her kidnappers pushed her out of an SUV with a bag over her head and a chain around her waist, she told authorities. A motorist found her and called 911.
No arrests have been made in the case, although Shasta County Sheriff Tom Bosenko recently said the investigation remains a “top priority.”
Authorities don’t have enough information on the kidnappers to even release sketches of them, since Papini said her head was covered for most of her time in captivity and she can’t describe them.
But police at least said one woman had curly hair, thin eyebrows and pierced ears.
The other woman, who was older, was described as having thick eyebrows with straight saltand-pepper hair.