Nashville police found a New Jersey woman who’d disappeared for nearly seven hours wandering along the Cumberland River and looking disheveled on Thursday morning — not far from where frat boy Riley Strain disappeared earlier this year.
Authorities began searching for the 33-year-old woman at around 4 a.m. after she’d gotten separated from her friend near Third Avenue and Broadway about two hours earlier, according to WKRN.
She was last seen on downtown surveillance cameras near the Woodland Street Bridge — which is where Strain was last seen before he vanished in March.
Cops quickly released recorded images of the woman as she walked toward the river.
Meanwhile, dozens of Metro police and local firefighters used thermal imaging, GPS from cell phone pings, a helicopter and a drone to help them in their search.
Authorities found the woman’s shoes and phone on an embankment — along with some blood, the station said.
A detective later spotted her climbing up the riverbank at about 9 a.m. with cuts and scratches on her.
Although the woman was dirty and shoeless, she knew who she was and told police she had been in the river — but she didn’t know why, according to the station.
She’d also called her mother at some point, which worried her mom enough that she called local cops to do a welfare check.
Authorities rushed her to Vanderbilt University Medical Center for treatment, the outlet said.
“I think it’s truly a miracle that she was fine, because she climbed herself right up,” Sgt. Bob Nielson of the Metro Nashville Police Department’s Cold Case Unit said.
“We don’t even know how far she went down into the river,” Nielson said. “She was blessed, quite honestly.”
Her disappearance was eerily similar to that of 22-year-old college kid Riley Strain, who was tossed out of a Nashville bar back in March just before he vanished into the night.
But his story didn’t end happily.
Two weeks later, authorities pulled his corpse from the Cumberland River, about 8 miles downstream from where he disappeared.
The medical examiner declared his death accidental, and a result of drowning and intoxication.
