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A woman is claiming to be Cherrie Mahan, who infamously disappeared from a school bus stop as an 8-year-old girl nearly four decades ago.
Cherrie vanished after getting off her school bus about 50 feet from her Pennsylvania home on Feb. 22, 1985.
After 13 years of dead ends, Cherrie was declared legally dead in November 1998.
But an unnamed woman caused a recent firestorm by claiming to be Cherrie in Facebook groups dedicated to finding her, which was doubted by her mom but has law enforcement sniffing around.
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Age progression of Cherrie Mahan, who was last seen on Feb. 22, 1985, on Cornplanter Road in Winfield Township, Butler County, Pennsylvania. (National Center for Missing and Exploited Children)
Unanswered questions about the infamous cold case have hung over the community like a dark storm cloud for 39 years, and unfortunately this isn’t the first time a woman out of the blue has claimed to be Cherrie.
Cherrie’s mom, Janice McKinney, said on Facebook that she doesn’t believe the woman is her daughter and told a local newspaper, The Butler Eagle, “It did not look anything like Cherrie at all.”
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Nevertheless, the Pennsylvania State Police took the claim seriously and opened an investigation.
State police told Fox News Digital that investigators are working with an “out-of-state agency” and attempted to reach the woman claiming to be Cherrie several times.
As of Wednesday morning, they had not made contact with her using the information that she provided, state police said.
A member of a Facebook group dedicated to Cherrie Mahan, who went missing in 1985, said he kept this poster since she disappeared. (Gretchen Wiesner/Memories of Cherrie Mahan/Facebook)
In one particular group – Memories of Cherrie Mahan – the moderators deleted the woman’s posts and blocked her for “harassing and bullying” other members.
“Friends I trust told me privately that the person was claiming to be Cherrie,” the group’s moderator, who goes by the name Brock Organ on Facebook, said in a post. “Few are in a position to evaluate the claim, and unfortunately, some people online are unstable and divisive…
“Some people say, ‘But what if it was really her?’ This has an easy answer: If it was really her, she could present herself at any police office and arrange for a DNA test without reaching out to people online and making aggressive claims.”
McKinney replied, “I talked to the police (sic) they are investigating (sic) this is very hard on me so please be aware I see everything.”
Moderator of the Memories of Cherrie Mahan Facebook group, Brock Organ, wrote this about why the moderators deleted the woman’s posts and blocked her. Underneath, in the replies, Cherrie’s mother commented. (Memories of Cherrie Mahan/Facebook)
Fox News Digital reached out to group moderators and McKinney but hasn’t heard back.
Another Facebook group moderator, who goes by the name Tiffany Howes on Facebook, came to Mckinney’s defense, as have many members of the group, in an emotional post on June 1.
“I wish that everybody could see the number of people over the years that have been in Janice’s inbox claiming to be Cherrie,” Howes wrote. “She doesn’t publicize all the claims.
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“It’s heartbreaking that people have the audacity to keep doing this to this poor woman. It rips her heart wide open again every time it happens because, of course, she wants to follow every lead and gets vested. She does not deserve to keep going through this.”
McKinney responded with an uplifting sentiment: “I’m ok it is hard but my job now is to educate people on this. Please pray for my next steps. Thanks for everyone who stands with me. God bless (sic) knows an (sic) someday we will.”
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Cherrie Mahan’s missing poster on the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s website. (National Center for Missing and Exploited Children)
The cold case is as troubling as it is puzzling.
A young girl within a short distance of her own driveway disappeared while getting off a school bus.
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The only potential lead is a bright blue 1976 Dodge van with a mural of a mountain and a skier, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
“It’s like a black hole opened up, and she fell in,” McKinney told KDKA-News in February, which marked the 39th year since her daughter was last seen.
Anyone with information about her whereabouts is asked to call the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children at (800) 843-5678.
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PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) — Indivisible R.I. is holding a rally on Sunday as part of the “ICE Out for Good” demonstrations taking place this weekend nationwide.
The rally is in response to the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good by a United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent on Wednesday in Minneapolis.
In a release, the organization said the rally will “honor the life lost, make visible the human cost of ICE`s actions, and demand that state and federal leaders reject local contracts with ICE, take every action possible to stop ICE from operating in Rhode Island, and hold ICE agents accountable when they break the law.”
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The last time many Vermonters saw Mikaela Shiffrin, the Alpine ski racer was standing atop Killington’s Superstar trail, seemingly a minute away from scoring an unprecedented 100th World Cup win.
Then, figuratively and literally, she went downhill fast.
The Burke Mountain Academy graduate had snagged the lead in the first of two giant-slalom runs on Nov. 30, 2024, only to follow up by slipping, somersaulting and slamming into a fence 12 seconds from the finish line.
Some 20,000 spectators went silent as the two-time Olympic gold medalist was rushed away on a rescue sled. They and 2 million national television viewers wouldn’t learn more until the skier took to Instagram at dusk from the nearby Rutland Regional Medical Center.
“I am so sorry to scare everybody,” Shiffrin said in a selfie video as she revealed an abdominal wound with a playful “ay, ay, ay.”
Fourteen months later, the 30-year-old is again on the rise in advance of next month’s Winter Olympics in Italy. Commentators point to her opening five-race winning streak this World Cup season. People with closer ties add that just returning to competition was a feat in itself.
“She’s been the best in the world for a long time, but given everything that has happened, to stay there is one of her most impressive accomplishments,” says Willy Booker, head of Shiffrin’s alma mater in the Northeast Kingdom.
Shiffrin graduated from the grade 8-12 ski school in 2013, the same year she became the youngest U.S. woman (at 17) to win a slalom world championship. Moving on to the Olympics, she scored slalom gold in 2014 and giant slalom gold and Alpine combined silver in 2018. A year later, she became the first skier to claim World Cup victories in all six disciplines — slalom, giant slalom, parallel slalom, alpine combined, super-G and downhill.
Booker, a onetime competitor himself, was at Killington on the 2024 Thanksgiving weekend when Shiffrin rocketed through the first of two runs of the giant slalom — a race down and around a series of gates — sparking the crowd to buzz about a potential new peak: a never-before-seen 100th World Cup win.
“It was amazing, building towards this crescendo,” Booker recalls of the anticipation.
Come the second round, NBC sportscasters spoke of especially icy course conditions just before Shiffrin launched from the start at 50 mph.
“She’s nervous, she’s a little bit stiff, and why would you not be?” commentator Picabo Street said on air. “But she’s forward, she’s leaning into it.”
That’s when Shiffrin slipped, struck two gates, lost a ski, slammed into a fence and went scarily still — all in five seconds.
Mikaela Shiffrin crashes during the second run of the Killington World Cup giant slalom on Nov. 30, 2024. Photo by Robert F. Bukaty/Associated Press“Nobody knew how bad it was,” Booker remembers of the sudden hush.
Medics transported Shiffrin about 15 miles west to Rutland Regional Medical Center, where hospital spokespeople maintained patient confidentiality even as the athlete and her crew set up cameras in the emergency room.
Shiffrin posted on social media that night, then appeared on NBC from Killington the next day.
“We’re just not totally sure how I got punctured,” she told viewers of the stab wound that missed perforating her colon by millimeters. “Very lucky to not have worse injuries.”
But Shiffrin added that it hurt to breathe, let alone move — similar to how she felt after the accidental death of her 65-year-old father in 2020 and her failure to medal after three falls in the 2022 Olympics.
After Killington, some would sit out the rest of the season, especially with the concluding world championships less than 10 weeks away. But Shiffrin was determined to return, even after fluid buildup and infection-signaling fever and chills forced her into surgery two weeks later.
Developing a step-by-step rehabilitation plan, the skier focused first on simply standing, then walking, then easy exercises and, after four weeks, stepping into ski boots and snow.
Two months after her crash, Shiffrin raced the World Cup slalom in Courchevel, France, on Jan. 30, 2025, finishing a seemingly confidence-building 10th. But she continued to struggle off the course, seeing occasional flashes of imagined stumbles and spills.
A therapist viewed the visions as signs of post-traumatic stress disorder before sharing words from the late children’s television star Mister Rogers: “What’s mentionable is manageable.” And so Shiffrin expanded her recovery efforts from body to mind.
“A lot of it is trust that with time and practice and exposure, clarity will come back,” the athlete recalled in a recent self-produced video series, “Moving Right Along,” on her YouTube channel.
Shiffrin went on to ski at the February world championships in Saalbach, Austria, placing fifth in the slalom and helping the U.S. team win a combined event. She capped the month a week later in Sestriere, Italy, by finally scoring her 100th World Cup victory.
Since then, Shiffrin has increased her World Cup total to 106. Students and staff at Burke Mountain Academy are set to watch her attempt to add to her medal count at next month’s Olympics.
“There is a huge amount of pride,” Booker says. “They go to the same school as the greatest ski racer of all time.”
One who has little else to prove — yet, in her estimation, still more to gain.
“I’ve been doing this for a while, but I’m still learning new things,” Shiffrin concluded in her video series. “There’s new exciting adventures always just around the corner, and I’m looking forward to seeing what’s next.”
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A Pennsylvania man is facing hundreds of charges after “over 100 full or partial sets of human and skeletal remains” were allegedly found in his home and a storage unit in a scene a district attorney described as a “horror movie come to life.”
Jonathan Gerlach, 34, of Ephrata, Pa., was arrested this week by police who were investigating a string of burglarized graves and mausoleums at the Mount Moriah Cemetery on the outskirts of Philadelphia, according to the Delaware County District Attorney’s Office.
“Detectives walked into a horror movie come to life… This is an unbelievable scene that no one involved, from myself, to the detectives to the medical examiners that are now trying to piece together what they are looking at — quite literally — none of them have ever seen anything like this before,” District Attorney Tanner Rouse said Thursday.
“Detectives have recovered an awful lot of bones at this point, and we are still trying to piece together who they are, where they are from and how many we are looking at, and it’s going to be quite some time before we have a final answer,” Rouse added, noting that some of the remains were months-old infants, while others were hundreds of years old.
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Jonathan Gerlach, 34, was arrested at the Mount Moriah Cemetery on the outskirts of Philadelphia, Pa., on Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2025. (Delaware County District Attorneys’ Office via AP/Google Maps)
The Delaware County District Attorney’s Office said around 8 p.m. on Tuesday, police were conducting surveillance of Mount Moriah Cemetery “when they observed the suspect’s car with numerous bones and skulls in plain view in the back seat of the vehicle.”
“Gerlach was then seen exiting the cemetery holding a burlap bag, crowbar and other assorted items. The offender was brought into custody where he admitted to stealing approximately 30 sets of human remains,” it continued.
“Through investigation it is believed that over 100 full or partial sets of human and skeletal remains have been recovered from Gerlach’s home and storage unit in Ephrata. This investigation remains ongoing,” it added.
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The Mount Moriah Cemetery on the border of Philadelphia. (Google Maps)
Gerlach was charged with more than 450 counts, including 100 counts each of abuse of corpse, theft by unlawful taking and receiving stolen property.
His bail was set at $1 million, with an arraignment hearing scheduled for Jan. 20.
The Delaware County District Attorney’s Office said Jonathan Gerlach was seen exiting Mount Moriah Cemetery this week “holding a burlap bag, crowbar and other assorted items.” (Google Maps)
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“I grieve for those who are upset by this, who are going through this, who are trying to figure out if it is in fact one of their loved ones,” Rouse said.
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