Melissa Casias was 53 years old and worked as an administrative assistant at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico when she disappeared on June 26, 2025. She told her husband Mark, also a laboratory employee, that she had forgotten her ID and needed to return home. Security cameras captured her walking alone along State Road 518. She never arrived.
Her phone was found reset to factory settings. Her keys were left among her belongings, the same ones her daughter Sierra found afterward. For nearly a year there was no trace of her, until on May 28, 2026, a hiker found human remains next to a firearm in the McGaffey Ridge area, within Carson National Forest, near Taos. State Police confirmed they were Casias’s.
The cause of death has not yet been determined: a more in-depth anthropological examination is expected. Her name now joins a list of at least ten scientists and workers at defense and space laboratories in the U.S. who have died or disappeared since 2022, a pattern the FBI is investigating without having provided, so far, a clear explanation.
