Doctor Pedals Away on Bike--Disappears on a Trail of Mystery

The last time any of his co-workers saw Dr. Steven Ray Stoltz, a tall, handsome young physician who arrived in Los Angeles seven weeks ago fresh out of medical school, he was pedaling away from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center on his blue-green Trek mountain bike.

The next morning, a Saturday and his only day off that week, he stopped at a Security Pacific Bank branch near his Westside apartment, deposited his biweekly paycheck then cashed a check for $300.

Records of the bank transactions, discovered in a bank book found later in his apartment, are the last traces of Stoltz that Los Angeles police have been able to find.

On Thursday--six days after the 25-year-old first-year surgical intern rode away from Cedars-Sinai--police, Stoltz’s friends and co-workers began a desperate air and ground search for him in Topanga Canyon--his destination, authorities believe.

Having spent days looking for the missing man in hospitals and morgues in three counties and alerting other law enforcement agencies of his disappearance, detectives in the Los Angeles Police Department’s missing person’s division narrowed the search area to the canyon northwest of downtown Los Angeles after finding Stoltz’s journal Thursday morning and discovering entries showing he had biked there on two previous Saturdays.

Stoltz’s father and younger brother, David, who flew to Los Angeles earlier in the week from Rapid City, S.D., to aid the police investigation, held a news conference a few hours after the journal was found and pleaded for bikers who know Topanga’s trails to help search for Stoltz.

“He’s a strong man,” Dennis Stoltz said of his oldest son during the news conference at the medical center. “He may be lying conscious and hurting somewhere.”

The belief that Stoltz may have gone biking and met some misfortune--a spill, a collision with another vehicle, or worse--is strengthened by the fact that only his mountain bike was missing from his garage, said LAPD Detective John Sack. His car and two other bicycles remained in place.

Friends and family members say Stoltz is very responsible and would not disappear intentionally for this long without contacting someone.

“We’ve pulled out all the stops, as we would in any unusual missing persons case such as this,” said Sack. “We haven’t ruled out any possibilities.”

Stoltz’s friends say they are doubly concerned that Stoltz would not intimately know the fire trails and bike paths in Topanga Canyon. Stoltz began his internship at Cedars-Sinai on June 21, shortly after he graduated from Washington University Medical School in St. Louis.

The friends told authorities that although he is a seasoned biker and formidable triathlon competitor, he tended to over-exert himself while biking, sometimes to the point of physical collapse. The journal entries show that Stoltz rode 48 miles during one of his trips to Topanga Canyon and 53 miles during another. He sometimes rode up to 70 miles at a stretch, Sack said.

On Thursday afternoon, as police and volunteers began a helicopter search above known bike trails in the canyon, volunteer park rangers scoured the area on foot and in off-road vehicles, said Beverly Hartunian, the mother of another young physician at Cedars-Sinai. She is coordinating information-gathering and contact with authorities.

To cover all bases, flyers bearing Stoltz’s photograph were passed out in neighborhoods around the medical center and the missing man’s apartment building, Hartunian said.

Stoltz is 6 feet 4, weighs 170 pounds and has brown hair and hazel eyes. Sack said anyone with information about his whereabouts should call detectives at (213) 485-5381.

“We just hope he didn’t meet with any foul play,” Hartunian said. “Of course, if he’s been in an accident and is injured, time is of the essence.”