Nearly a year later, ambiguity still surrounds Kimberly Blum’s disappearance

It’s been almost a year since Rosalie Blum saw her daughter, who went missing last June, but the pain and frustration have only grown.

“As a matter of fact, it gets worse,” Blum said, a few days before Mother’s Day. “As time goes by, you realize most likely something happened, but what happened, you don’t know. So it’s a very ambiguous loss.”

Kimberly Blum, who was 44 and living in Sunland with her mother at the time of her disappearance, was last seen on June 5 in La Crescenta. She’d attended her niece’s eighth-grade graduation ceremony in the morning, and was supposed to help her sister Jennifer Franklin set up the graduation party planned for later that afternoon.

Around 4 p.m., she arrived at Franklin’s La Crescenta home, where her sister was picking up dog toys from the floor, commenting that her dog doesn’t like them.

“She said, ‘Mine does,’” Franklin recalled, adding that Kimberly Blum then asked her to bag the toys. Franklin responded, “Can you?” she recalled.

Perhaps it was Franklin’s tone that upset her sister, who left shortly after. Several minutes later, Franklin noticed that Kimberly Blum’s car was gone, which prompted her to text her an apology, asking her to come back.

“I would really love you to be here with us,” she wrote. “I love you.”

But Kimberly Blum never responded, and no one has heard from her since. There’s been no activity on her bank accounts or cellphone.

A few days later, a maintenance worker found empty pill containers belonging to Kimberly Blum in Angeles National Forest — she was on medication for anxiety and depression, her mother said. However, multiple helicopter searches over the mountains yielded no leads. Investigators never found her car, a silver 2004 Honda CRV.

This Mother’s Day, Rosalie Blum is asking the public for any leads on her daughter’s whereabouts. She’s offered a $5,000 reward for any information that leads to finding out what happened to Kimberly Blum.

A few weeks ago, Rosalie Blum was searching for something in her garage when she came across a box of her daughter’s keepsakes, such as pictures from trips and various knickknacks.

“I totally lost it. I really, really did,” Rosalie Blum said. “The grief is always sitting there on your shoulder even if you’re doing something that is a happy moment.”

But perhaps the most challenging part of the disappearance, aside from the emotional aspect, is navigating bureaucracy while not having the power to take care of what Kimberly Blum left behind.

Blum’s family was stuck with the car registration bills even though her car remains missing, and was hounded by collections for her unpaid credit card bills, Franklin said. Yet they can’t take control of her belongings and accounts since there’s no death certificate.

“The rest of life goes on, but nobody acknowledges that they’re not here,” Franklin said.

Kimberly Blum operated her own business, called Garage Fairy, through which she helped people organize their offices, garages or homes.

“She was a brilliant girl, very smart, spoke French fluently,” Rosalie Blum said. “She was well-traveled, well-read, very smart, very funny.”

Kimberly Blum was described as 5 feet 2, weighing 144 pounds. She was last seen wearing a black tank top and also wears prescription glasses.

“Just to know anything more than I know now I think would be helpful,” Rosalie Blum said.