Fresno Police Department officials say that a phone call between Xiong and her boyfriend could indicate foul play. These claims confirm that the "friend" who last spoke to this missing woman is indeed her significant other. A tidal wave of other details have made their way to the media, including the hours surrounding Xiong's bizarre disappearance.
Her family members have admitted that they argued with the young woman late Friday night, when she had come home after a night of drinking. Family members say that she was intoxicated when she got into an argument with her mother. She reportedly "stormed off," abruptly leaving the residence on foot. Sometime after midnight, she spoke on the phone with her boyfriend. The unnamed man told police that she sounded "winded" for some reason (perhaps because she was walking?), and that their phone call was abruptly ended when she screamed and hung up the phone.
In this post, I speculated on the possibility of Lucy Xiong falling victim to foul play. The circumstances surrounding this phone call with her boyfriend (who had previously been reported as a "friend") make it easy to suspect that she could have been preyed upon by an opportunistic person. Knowing that she was intoxicated at the time, and angry, suggests that she was also in a vulnerable state of mind, which could have made her a target to a predator.
On the other hand, authorities in Fresno say that her boyfriend heard the sounds of her feet crunching on gravel while they talked on the phone -- a detail that could lend a clue to where she was at the time of the phone call. Police believe that she could have been walking near the streets of McKinley and First. This happens to be near a deep water canal, with a gravel embankment.
It's entirely possible that this young woman, who was angry and inebriated at the time of her disappearance, fell into the canal while walking and talking on the phone with her boyfriend. This theory is only further supported by reports of "sounds of a drowning" in the area on the night of her disappearance. However, police seem to be focused on the idea of "foul play," which is absolutely likely. Nonetheless, the canal needs to be searched, if at the least to eliminate drowning as a possibility.