NEW ORLEANS--Drowning was the cause of death for Terrilynn Monette, the missing West Bank teacher whose body was discovered in Bayou St. John on Saturday, according to the Orleans Parish Coroner's Office. There were no signs of trauma to her body, said John Gagliano, the coroner's chief investigator.
LSU forensic dentists confirmed Monette's identity through dental records, Gagliano said. Toxicology results are pending and the results will be ready in about two weeks, he said. NOPD's fatality unit will try to reconstruct the accident to determine what caused Monette's car to end up in the bayou, said NOPD spokeswoman Remi Braden. Meanwhile, officers in NOPD's 3rd District are working to enhance all the video evidence in the case.
"On behalf of this police department, I want to express my sincerest condolences to Ms. Monette's family, and assure them that our detectives will do everything they can to find the answers as to how this tragedy happened," Police Superintendent Ronal Serpas said in a statement.
Monette's car was discovered near the corner of Harrison Avenue and Wisner Boulevard shortly before noon on Saturday. Slidell police officer Mark Michaud, who had volunteered to dive and search for the car, located it shortly before noon. The car -- matching the license plate, make, model and color of Monette's -- was pulled from the water around 3:25 p.m.
The discovery came more than three months after Monette disappeared after leaving a Lakeview bar early on March 2. For weeks, large groups of volunteers turned out to search for the 26-year-old woman, whose disappearance was covered in national media. New Orleans police led the search efforts and reviewed hundreds of hours of surveillance tapes to try to determine what happened to her. Numerous other cars were also pulled from nearby water bodies as the search proceeded.
The night she went missing, Monette had been drinking, and she told friends who were at the bar with her that she planned to sleep in her car for a while before driving to her apartment complex in the area of Robert E. Lee Boulevard and Paris Avenue.
Monette, a second-grade teacher at Woodland West Elementary School in Harvey, exited a bank parking lot next door to Parlay's at about 5 a.m. and headed toward Marconi Drive.
Police had thought that Monette turned left, or northbound, at Marconi, on the edge of City Park, based on red-light camera footage investigators reviewed. But her car was found farther east, in waters just past the corner of Harrison and Wisner, suggesting she likely kept going straight instead, driving through City Park before -- for reasons still unknown -- she ended up in in Bayou St. John.
"Now that Ms. Monette's car has been found, we begin the second phase of this investigation," Serpas said. "Both homicide detectives and our fatality unit were on the scene today, so that they can pick up where (other) officers have left off and start finding out exactly how and why the car ended up where it did."
Posted By: Siebra Muhammad
Tuesday, June 11th 2013 at 10:48AM
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