Volunteer Efforts Come Up Empty in Malibu Mountains Search

• Family and Friends Hoped for Clues in Missing SoCal Student’s Disappearance

BY HANS LAETZ

Los Angeles celebrity attorney Gloria Allred pointed a group of evangelical Christians to the mountains of Malibu last weekend in an effort to keep the name Donna Jou in the headlines—and to give canyon roads a thorough search for the young woman’s remains or belongings.
More than a dozen carloads of members of Trinity Search & Recovery came from as far away as the Bay Area to comb roadways and byways above the coast, looking for any sign of the young woman. They were met by local volunteers who fanned out on every road between U.S. 101 and the shoreline, seeking anything.
They found nothing.
Jou was a 19-year-old pre-med freshman on vacation from San Diego State University last summer when she hopped on the rear of a motorcycle driven by a man who had replied to her free offer of math tutoring on Craigslist. He turned out to be a convicted sex offender. She was last heard from when she sent her mother a text message indicating that she was being held against her will in a bathroom at a West Los Angeles house owned by the man, John Steven Burgess, 35.
Burgess has remained silent as to Jou’s whereabouts, why his motorcycle disappeared, why he was spotted washing his belongings and throwing them in a dumpster a block from his house, or why he fled to Florida. Burgess has been sent to prison on a probation violation charge.
Allred told reporters she could not reveal why she was pointing volunteer searchers to the Santa Monica Mountains where they searched by car Saturday and Sunday, stopping at every pullout to look for a backpack, helmet, or other sign of Jou.
Members of her family came up from southern Orange County to the command post at Malibu Bluffs Park. They told the press of their devastating loss, and then went searching along Kanan Dume Road, the serpentine 13-mile canyon and mountain link that Burgess was known to favor on weekend motorcycle rides.
Twenty-four specific search areas were examined by volunteers led by Trinity Search & Recovery, a Pleasanton-based evangelical group that mixes prayer with activist outreach efforts. Its director, Mike Melson, said he started the group after being embarrassed that evangelicals from Texas and the Midwest would come searching for missing people in California.
Melson said the group traveled 400 miles to Malibu to mix prayer and active reconnaissance in the search, and give Jou’s family hope. Sheriff’s deputies had reportedly searched local canyon areas last summer, when Burgess was first identified as a suspect and his frequent trips through the mountains were noted.
Some of the canyon areas examined by the group were burned in the two major fires that swept the area last fall.
Following the two days of searching and prayer, Allred told reporters that the effort was not a waste, as it eliminated possible places where Jou, her belongings or Burgess’s missing motorcycle could have been disposed of.