Friends and former co-workers are stunned after a tragic ending to a search for a missing Mishawaka woman.

Berrien County police say they found 35-year-old Donna Mae Maximenko's body last night in a wooded area behind a New Buffalo hotel.

Police have not yet released the cause of death and will not say if it is being treated as a homicide or not.

There was an autopsy scheduled for Thursday, and we're still awaiting those results.

Meanwhile, friends and co-workers who were hopeful they could find Maximenko alive say the news of the discovery is hard to swallow.

On Wednesday night, friends gathered at The Vine in downtown South Bend to form a search party that would have started looking for Maximenko Thursday morning.

But instead Thursday, it was a quiet and somber morning.

“It was really strange today to walk in this morning because you just expect Donna to be in the bar so I think everyone’s just in shock,” said Mary Spillane, owner of The Vine.

She'd only worked at The Vine for about 9 months, but the owner says Maximenko had already found her niche.

“She just had that very dynamic personality. She was so upbeat and she… was always laughing and you could joke around with her and mess with her,” Spillane said.

But Maximenko may be more widely remembered for the 10 years she worked as a bartender at The Linebacker.

“She touched a lot of peoples lives over the course of her time here in South Bend,” said Greg Delinski, General Manager of The Linebacker.

Online message boards at sites like Facebook and ND Nation, remember her too.

Now, some say, they can only hope for answers.

“We just want to know what happened. She doesn’t seem like the type that would take her own life, so we just want to know was there any foul play? Was she somewhere, did someone follow her, what happened. Just to put closure on it for everyone’s sake that knew her,” Spillane said.

“I don’t think it’s very important; how it happened. I think it’s important we remember the good times and remember her as she was,” Delinski said.

Friends say some of the speculation about a bad break-up may have been blown out of proportion, but again, police have not released a cause of death at this time.

Meanwhile, WNDU spoke with some of those friends who were planning to go out looking for Maximenko Thursday.

They did not want to comment on camera, because they said it had been a very rough night and morning after getting the news. They had hoped and prayed this wouldn't be how the story ended.