Glendale police said a woman invented a kidnapping hoax to avoid telling her parents that she had been lying to them about college.



Sgt. Tom Lorenz told The Times that Nancy Salas fled her family's home Wednesday morning because she wanted to escape the embarrassment of revealing to her family and friends that she was not going to graduate from UCLA as she had told them for more than a year. The young woman's friends and family were under the impression that she would be graduating from the school with a degree in sociology next month, and had planned a party.



Salas, who UCLA officials said was enrolled until 2008, employed an elaborate ruse, police said.



On her blog, she wrote about the stress of homework and finals. To her friends, she spoke of applying for graduate school. A woman whose children Salas used to babysit, Sheri Jennings, said the young woman sometimes asked to come to work late so that she could attend office hours with a professor.



Her parents, immigrants from El Salvador, used to wear UCLA T-shirts and kept a UCLA chair in their living room.

She went missing Wednesday and was found Thursday in Merced, claiming she had been kidnapped.

On Thursday night, after Salas was flown back to Glendale, she admitted that she had been lying about her life -- and about the kidnapping.



“Up until she was going to face her family, she was sticking to her story,” Lorenz said. He said she confessed around 8:30 p.m., telling investigators that she made up the story about being kidnapped because she was “idolized” by her family, friends and church for being a successful student.

