Naman Shrestha
When a Colorado teen named Lashaya Nae Stine, who dreamt of becoming a nurse, suddenly vanished into thin air from her home in 2016, her family and friends became concerned about her well-being. Shocked and worried, the entire community also tried to cooperate with the authorities and provided all the information they had related to Lashaya. Several tips also led the detectives to believe she was trafficked. In Freeform’s ‘Somebody Knows Something: Lost in the Night,’ all the intricate details of the case and the subsequent investigation are covered through insightful, emotional interviews with the missing teen’s loved ones and the officials working on the case.
Lashaya Nae Stine Was Excited About College When She Went Missing
Born on February 8, 2000, Lashaya Nae Stine was the beloved daughter of Sabrina Jones and sister of O’Shea Jones, Shaeron Stine, and three other siblings. Lashaya also shared a close-knit bond with her aunt, Michelle Jones, and her cousin, Ebony Tolliver. She had a reputation for being a top-grade student at George Washington High School, with dreams of becoming a nurse. In 2016, Lashaya had been accepted into a summer internship program at the University of Colorado. Looking forward to going to college, she had been interviewing for a cashier position at a sub shop to support her studies.
However, her dreams remained unfulfilled as she went missing in the early hours of July 15, 2016, from her home in Aurora, Colorado. When her mother, Sabrina, couldn’t find Lashaya in her room or anywhere in the house in the morning, she called 911 in a state of panic. She claimed that she had to convince the authorities that her daughter was not a runaway before an officer was sent over to the Stine household. It was observed that her window was open and her belongings were still in her room, except for her cell phone. Thus, an extensive search for Lashaya was launched.
Lashaya Nae Stine’s Ex-Boyfriend Was Considered a Person of Interest
At first, the police believed that Lashaya Nae Stine was a runaway. But as the investigation progressed, the detectives learned about her ex-boyfriend, with whom she had an on-and-off relationship. Her close friends alleged that she had planned to meet up with him in the early hours of July 15, 2016. After locating him, the police interviewed him and learned that he met Lashaya in the area of North Middle School between 2 am and 3 am on the fateful morning. As per his account, she asked to meet him to tell him something important, but didn’t discuss it at all when they met. He claimed that she arrived half an hour late and talked for about 10 minutes before parting ways. The police reviewed the ex-boyfriend’s cell phone records, which showed he even reached out to her after a while but didn’t receive a response.
Upon checking Lashaya’s cell phone records, it corroborated her ex-boyfriend’s account as she had gone to the middle school. They also spotted her walking down towards the school on the surveillance footage of the cameras overlooking Peoria Street. In the footage, the detectives also saw two people walking near the school around the time Lashaya met with her ex-boyfriend. Since the area near the school has a bad reputation for being a sex working hub, the Stine family also received tips from people claiming that Lashaya was trafficked and forced to work as a sex worker. In the years that followed, several true crime influencers and internet sleuths also talked about multiple theories that emerged from her disappearance.
Since the police hadn’t ruled out the ex-boyfriend as a potential suspect, the FBI went to his former home in Aurora in November 2020 and searched the entire property for three days as his father removed a few blocks of concrete from the home after Lashaya went missing. However, the search and inspection of the concrete slabs, conducted with the help of search dogs, came up empty. The investigators also found that she had been secretly exchanging texts with a person who claimed to be a teenager based in California. Upon digging deeper, he was actually a teenager living in California. Despite ten years of unanswered questions about Lashaya’s whereabouts, her family continues to hope that somebody will speak up and provide all the pieces to the puzzle.
Read More: Bianca Carrasco: What Happened to Her? Is She Found or Missing?
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