Mengyao "May" Zhou, 23, missing for five days was found dead January 25 in the trunk of her compact car in Santa Rosa, and may have taken her own life, police said. But Yitong Zhao, her father, said he doubted her death was a suicide.
His daughter is an electrical engineering student, disappeared after leaving her on-campus home Saturday, telling friends she was completing errands. Santa Rosa Junior College police officers found her car at about 3:30 a.m. January 25 in a parking lot near the school's planetarium.
Her father said May was happy at Stanford, where she was a second-year graduate student and a doctoral candidate. He said his daughter, who had bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, held three or four patents on devices related to digital imaging technology. He said he could not think of a reason why his daughter would drive to Santa Rosa, and did not think she knew anyone in the area. (Source: Jun Doyle and Michael Cabanahan, San Francisco Chronicle, Jan 26. 2007).