Missing Maui woman’s family says police are investigating suspicious Venmo payments
Hannah Kobayashi’s last texts suggested she was being ‘intercepted’ by someone near a LA Metro station
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Police are probing suspicious payments made by a Hawaiian woman who went missing more than two weeks ago in Los Angeles.
According to the family of Hannah Kobayashi, a 30-year-old photographer from Maui, police are investigating a pair of payments she made over Venmo to a man and woman on November 9, shortly before her disappearance, and just after she missed her connecting flight from LA to New York, according to the US Sun.
One of the payments was sent at 6:25pm to a woman named Veronica Almendarez and was labeled with a bow-and-arrow emoji.
Less than an hour later, at 7:19pm, Kobayashi made a second payment to a man named Jonathan Taylor with the subject line "reading." That payment was reportedly for a tarot card reading, sources familiar with the investigation told the news site.
The woman's aunt, Larie Pidgeon, told the outlet that their search efforts are still focused on downtown LA, and that they still have hope to find Kobayashi alive.
She asked people "across the nation to keep an eye in case she has been taken outside of California."
“We are looking at all possibilities, hotels, metros, bus, train stations,” she said.
It's unclear exactly how much she sent in the payments she made before she was last heard from on November 11.
It was then that the Kobayashi family said they received a "strange and cryptic" text from the woman's phone suggesting she was being "intercepted" while she was boarding a Metro train, and expressing fear that someone was trying to steal her identity.
"Once the family started pressing, she went dark," Pidgeon told the Associated Press on Saturday. She said the phone "just went dead" after November 11.
Pidgeon did not elaborate on the texts. She did say that the family reviewed surveillance footage of her near the Pico Metro station in downtown LA with an unidentified person who Pidgeon believes "misled her."
"We believe that she just trusted the wrong person," she told USA Today.
Kobayashi's disappearance is sadly not the only tragedy the family is weathering.
Early on Sunday morning, the body of Hannah's father, Ryan Kobayashi, was found near the Los Angeles International Airport. The 58-year-old had flown out to LA to search for his daughter, and apparently died by suicide, according to a county coroner's report.
The coroner's report listed his cause of death as suicide caused by multiple blunt-force traumatic injuries.
Pidgeon told USA Today that Kobayashi's father died of a "broken heart."
"Being on the streets and seeing what the possibilities of where his daughter could be. No sleep. The speculating rumors that are going around. It just took a toll on him," she said.
Meanwhile, volunteers in LA have gathered to help search for any sign of Kobayashi.