Remains of Mitrice Richardson Exhumed

Following accusations of ineptitude by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, the remains of 24-year-old Mitrice Richardson were exhumed from an Inglewood, Calif., cemetery on Wednesday morning.

Richardson is a former beauty pageant contestant who graduated from California State University, Fullerton, with a 4.0 GPA. She went missing in September 2009 after being released from the L.A. County Sheriff's Malibu station in the middle of the night without her car, cell phone, or purse. Richardson was taken in to the station when she couldn't pay her bill at a tony Malibu restaurant, and was found in possession of a small amount of marijuana. Reportedly, she was also acting erratically.

The Sheriff's Department is being sued by Richardson's family members not only for her controversial release, but for the way police handled her remains after they were discovered in a Malibu Canyon ravine in August 2010. An official from the coroner's office says police removed the bones of Richardson's skull, pelvis, and leg without his permission (no clothes were found at the scene). Police said they had to remove the remains immediately or wild animals could have gotten to them.

Making matters worse for the Sheriff's Department is the fact that eight more bones were found near the ravine in February 2011, six months after Richardson's initial remains were found. "That discovery came just a few months after Richardson's mother said she found a finger bone while at the site memorializing her daughter," the Los Angeles Times reports.

Richardson's father, who told The Advocate of his appreciation for the L.A. gay community's support, hopes the found bones, along with the exhumed remains, will help solve the mystery of what happened to Richardson on that September night.