Indian American family from California goes missing during Spring Break road trip

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Relatives and friends of an Indian American family from California are seeking help from anyone and everyone to find them after the family went missing last week while on a road trip during Spring Break, according to multiple sources.

According to DailyMail.com, the family was traveling in the same Californian County where another family of eight had died after plunging off a cliff.

The family-of-four; Sandeep Thottapilly, 42, Soumya Thottapilly, 38, Siddhant, 12, and Saachi, 9, were on a road trip to Portland, Oregon and had left on March 30.

They were going to make a quick stop at a relative’s house in San Jose on April 6 while returning home to Valencia, but disappeared in Mendocino County.

Sandeep’s father Babu Subramaniam Thottapilly has even tweeted to India’s minister of external affairs Sushma Swaraj asking for her help to which she replied that she was ‘in constant touch’ with the Consulate in San Francisco and would help find out what happened, according to DailyMail.com.

The Thottapilly family was reported on April 8 when they didn’t show up at their relative’s house on April 6.

The family was said to be traveling in a 2016 Maroon Honda Pilot with a California license plate of 7MMX13B and their last known location was near the Klamath-Redwood National Park in Del Norte County, north of Redwood National and State Parks in northwest California.

According to the Hindu, the road which the family was travelling on Friday is narrow and adventurous and the weather was very bad that day, with heavy rains and wind.

The family was staying in a resort on Wednesday and Thursday before restarting their journey on Friday morning.

CHP told Mercury News that an SUV, which looked fairly similar to the one the family was in when they went missing, was found “completely submerged in the Eel River” after it was reported that it went down an embankment on Friday at around 1:10 p.m. on Highway 101 near Dora Creek however, nothing has been confirmed yet.

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Joana Warren told Q13 that the San Jose Police Department is working to obtain search warrants for the family’s cell phone carriers to see where their phones last pinged.

They are also checking to see if the vehicle had a locating system.

Anyone who has information about the missing family is asked to contact their local authorities, 813-616-3091, Detective Michelle Zanato with the San Jose Police Departments’ Missing Person’s Unit at 408-277-4786 or CHP Garberville area field office at 707-923-2155.