Pratishta Budhathoki, a 20-year-old Nepali girl working and studying in the US state of Colorado who had gone missing since June 18, has been found.

Pratistha Budhathoki

Pratistha Budhathoki (File Photo)
Budhathoki knocked on the door of a home near Marys Lake Lodge, Colorado, about 1 p.m. on Monday and asked to use the telephone and fled moments later, but the homeowner recognized her from news reports and called police, AP said quoting the police.

“Police found her about an hour later in a field nearby,” AP quoted Estes Park Police commander Wes Kufeld as saying. She seemed not to have eaten anything for days and was offered food by police.

The police oficer said that the only explanation they had about her at the moment was that she didn’t want to go to work.

Budhathoki was working in an ice cream parlour at the east end of Rocky Mountain National Park, about 50 miles north of Denver, and a sandwich shop at a railway station to help pay for her studies at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota. Her friends at the ice cream parlour had informed the police after she failed attend her job.

Throughout their search police did not suspect foul play and had stopped looking on Sunday, according to AP. There had been signs that she was still alive, including a cell phone call from Denver International Airport two days after she went missing and financial records and witnesses indicating that she ate at a restaurant atop Prospect Mountain at the end of the Estes Park Aerial Tramway on June 22. On Thursday, police found her neatly folded uniform on a rock outcropping on the mountain, the report further said.

Police said that Budhathoki would face no criminal charges and informed that her parents were landing at Denver International Airport to receive her. She is healthy and would be allowed to leave with her parents after a medical test, they added.