16-year-old girl reported missing from Elizabeth found safe, CBI says

ELIZABETH, Colorado — A 16-year-old girl who was reported missing from Elizabeth earlier this month has been found safe, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation said Monday. 

Dawn Kuzik-Michal reported her daughter Katie Michal missing on Sept. 8. On Sept. 10, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation put out an Endangered Missing Alert for her. 

CBI said Monday that Katie has been found safe. 

In an interview with 9NEWS Sunday, Kuzik-Michal remembered Sept. 8 starting like any normal day with her daughter. The two had breakfast together, and Katie went off to her room.

“When I did go check on her, she wasn’t there,” Kuzik-Michal said Sunday. “I went downstairs and couldn’t find her. I thought she went outside.”

Kuzik-Michal wouldn’t see her daughter later that evening, or for the next 14 days. 

“For her not to contact somebody and say, ‘Hey, I’m OK, but I don’t want to come home,’ is what scares me the most,” Kuzik-Michal said Sunday. 

Over the past two weeks, Kuzik-Michal said her family and neighbors in Elizabeth poured in support.

“It has been a major effort,” Kuzik-Michal said Sunday. “A lot of people in this area, friends, work, have flown drones, they have been on horses, four wheelers, walking. When we had the initial meeting, there was maybe 75 to 100 people at the golf course to search for her. Next day, top of the hill, about 50 people to search for her.”

Jennifer Puckett, Katie’s aunt, said not knowing her niece’s whereabouts kept her up at night.

“It’s just hard,” Puckett said. “Difficult. Nothing like I’ve ever been in before. It’s just an awful situation to not know. We just don’t know. I can’t make, justify, try to make sense of it. None of it makes sense.”

Puckett said Katie isn’t the type to leave without letting someone know where she’s going. 

Kuzik-Michal said Katie doesn’t have her phone and hasn’t had it since July. She said she took it away because Katie was having issues and the phone was causing a lot of problems.

She said Sunday that she hoped Katie could get to a phone and call home to let her family know she’s alright.

“The unknown, I think, is the worst,” Kuzik-Michal said. “You know if we at least knew she was OK, even if she didn’t want to come home or had issues, the unknown is the worst.”

“I just want her to know we all care for her,” Puckett said. “Her friends care. We just want to know she’s OK.”

There was also an urgency in finding Katie due to her medical condition. Her family said she’s epileptic and, to their knowledge, doesn’t have her medication.

“This is the first time she’s been off of it since she was 2 months old,” Kuzik-Michal said.

“She can sometimes have multiple episodes a day even on the medication,” Puckett said.

Kuzik-Michal said her daughter is an Alaska native and the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives Task Force was a resource in spreading the word about her disappearance.

According to Senate Bill 22-150, which was signed into law in Colorado in 2022, an alert on Katie’s disappearance should have been issued within two hours of law enforcement receiving a missing persons report. The Colorado Bureau of Investigation put out an alert on Sept. 10, two days after Katie was last seen.

Raven Payment with MMIR said the goal of the bill was to force law enforcement to respond to these types of cases and address crises in the Indigenous community. While action is being taken, she said “it’s still slow, which loses valuable time to recover a missing teenager before they encounter additional risk factors.”

Kuzik-Michal and Puckett said Sunday that until Katie was found, they would continue to post flyers and search for her.