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Woman, 35, missing for a year mysteriously reappears at gas station - and she's arrested just minutes later
A woman who had been missing more than a year resurfaced at a gas station, only to be arrested minutes later due to an outstanding warrant.
Tori Milsak, 35, vanished from Hot Springs, Arkansas on June 6, 2024, sparking a frantic search from her family.
Police reports at the time indicated she may have been struggling with 'mental health concerns.'
Milsak walked into a gas station in Little Rock, about 55 miles away from where she disappeared, on Thursday - just over a year after she was last seen.
She told one of the gas station attendants that she was a missing person, and the employee called police, according to a police report seen by Newsweek.
When police arrived, they spoke with Milsak and confirmed her identity.
She said she had run away from her home a year ago, but saw herself on the news when she was reported missing.
Milsak was then taken into custody in relation to an outstanding warrant.
Her family are overjoyed that she is safe but are still trying to piece together where she was and how she vanished.
Speaking to WBRC News, her brother Jason Hamel said he was initially 'shocked' when he learned she had been found.
'I'd been told that she might have been murdered multiple times,' he said.
'Hope was lost. I mean, like everybody said, you hold onto that 1 percent that she'd be found alive, and she's that 1 percent.'
Hamel had previously revealed his sister was dealing with post traumatic stress disorder at the time she vanished following a traumatic incident in the year prior.
He said she'd mostly stopped communicating with loved ones in 2023 as she battled her mental health.
'Makes me very angry, not at Tori, but at some people. Now, it's time to try to start the healing process and rebuild Tori's life,' he said.
He has yet to speak with her while she remains in custody.
'I'm nervous, and I want to find out what happened. Was she held against her will? It's been a year. I want to see her, make sure she's OK,' Hamel said.
Their last conversation came during a family crisis, in which Hamel and his father were weighing whether to take another sibling off live support following a tragic motorcycle accident.
Milsak had called and sounded distressed about something on the phone, but Hamel dismissed her. She vowed to call in a week and hung up, only to fall off the radar entirely and lose contact.
'That's haunted me for the last year, thinking that maybe if I took an extra five minutes, things could have been different,' he said.
Milsak will apear in Garland County court in July on charges linked to her outstanding warrant.
