Teen found safe; her boyfriend and his grandmother face charges

ELIZABETH, Colorado — Two people face charges of harboring a minor after a teenage girl from Elizabeth disappeared this month.

The teen’s mother reported her 16-year-old daughter missing on Sept. 8. On Sept. 10, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation put out an Endangered Missing Alert for her. CBI said Monday that the girl was found.

Now that the girl is safe, 9NEWS has removed her name and image and her family members’ names from this story because she is a minor.

CBI did not provide additional details, but according to the 18th Judicial District Attorney’s Office, the girl’s boyfriend, who is a juvenile, faces charges of harboring a minor. His grandmother faces the same charge.

In an interview with 9NEWS on Sunday, the mother remembered Sept. 8 starting like any normal day with her daughter. The two had breakfast together, and the girl went off to her room.

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

The mother 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,” the girl’s mother said Sunday. 

Over two weeks, family and neighbors in Elizabeth poured in support.

“It has been a major effort,” the mother 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.”

The girl’s aunt said that not knowing her niece’s whereabouts kept her up at night.

“It’s just hard,” the aunt 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.”

The aunt said her niece isn’t the type to leave without letting someone know where she’s going. 

The girl’s mother said her daughter didn’t have her phone and hadn’t had it since July. She said she took it away because her daughter was having issues and the phone was causing a lot of problems.

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

“The unknown, I think, is the worst,” she 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,” her aunt said. “Her friends care. We just want to know she’s OK.”

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

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

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

The girl’s mother 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 the girl’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 the girl 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.”

The girl’s mother and aunt said Sunday that until the girl was found, they would continue to post flyers and search for her.