(June 4, 2008)—Bosque County News Managing Editor La Dawn Garland, 42, was released from jail Tuesday in Lander, Wyoming after an unauthorized use of a motor vehicle charge was dropped.

She left the jail Tuesday with family members.

Garland was found Monday at a highway rest stop near Lander.

She was taken to the Fremont County Detention Center after she was treated at a hospital in Lander, sheriff’s office spokesman Jerry Evagelatos said.

She told authorities she had been at the rest stop since Friday and said she hadn’t eaten or had anything to drink since pulling off the highway.

She was in the Dodge pickup truck in which she left Meridian Wednesday, ostensibly to drive to Waco to purchase a cell phone battery.

The truck is registered to the publisher of the newspaper.

It was impounded after Garland’s arrest, but Garland and family members reclaimed it Tuesday morning.

Evagelatos said investigators had asked Garland about the reason she disappeared, but would not comment on what she told them except to say that she said she left Central Texas of her own free will.

“I think that’s best left to the family to discuss,” he said.

Lander, Wyoming, a community of about 7,000 residents in the foothills of Wyoming’s Wind River Mountains, is more than 1,300 miles from Waco.