Somebody Knows Something (2026) s01e02 Episode Script
Lost in the Night
-[suspenseful music playing]
-[baby cooing]
[news reporter] Lashaya Stine
left their family home
around 2 a.m. on July 15th
and never came back.
Somebody out there knows something.
[Chamberlain] Lashaya Stine was
just 16 when she disappeared.
Since then, the Internet hasn't stopped
talking about it.
She thought that she was coming back,
but somebody had to have killed her.
Some people even said that
she was being moved across state lines.
Tips began to flood in.
"Lashaya was at a bus stop."
"Lashaya's at a party."
"I saw Lashaya with this man."
[Chamberlain]
Some believe she was kidnapped.
He basically just told us that, "Yeah,
your daughter was being trafficked."
[Chamberlain]
The truth could even be darker.
The following morning,
a gun and cell phone was found,
and it had not been there the day before.
We learned that she had an ex-boyfriend.
I did not want Lashaya talking to him.
[Cofer] Police have been receiving tips.
People that have seen Lashaya
at these seedy motels.
A lot of this is new information
that hasn't been released.
Every year, more than 600,000 people
go missing in the United States.
[news reporter 3] The story of Jaycee
Dugard shocked the nation.
Amy Bradley simply disappeared
without a trace.
Asha Degree went to bed one night
and was gone in the morning.
I'm Kara Robinson Chamberlain,
and in 2002,
I was one of those victims.
[news reporter 4] At just 15 years old,
Kara was abducted by a serial killer.
[news reporter 5] Assaulted
and tortured for 18 hours,
but somehow she managed to escape.
I went on to a career in law enforcement.
[Lott] Then she wanted to be
a victim advocate
and show them how they can be
a survivor like her.
Now I'm investigating the cases
true crime fans are obsessed with.
Because there are people who don't know
what happened to their loved ones.
Somebody knows something.
Somebody saw something.
And if I can bring
one person some answers,
then it's worth everything.
[suspenseful music playing]
Lashaya Stine is a 16-year-old girl who
went missing from Aurora, Colorado.
In the middle of the night,
she disappeared from her bedroom
in the basement of her family's home.
And since then, people online
have been speculating why.
When Lashaya went missing, she only had
her phone, she didn't take clothes.
[person 1] Someone lured her
from her home that night,
and she had no idea
that she would never come back.
The window to her room was found open,
so it was assumed she left through it.
Possibly voluntarily, possibly not.
Amara Cofer covered Lashaya's case.
[Facetime ringtone]
-Hi!
-How are you?
I'm good. So, this case
Yeah, this is one, you know,
I-I did it a couple years ago,
but it's a story that stayed with me,
and there's still no answers
about what happened to Lashaya.
So tell me a little bit about Lashaya.
[Cofer] She was your normal,
average teenager.
She was a good student.
She was top of her class.
She had dreams of becoming a nurse.
She had been accepted into an internship
at the University of Colorado,
and she was making plans for college.
To have the discipline
to go after an internship,
that speaks very highly of her upbringing,
her character.
I was not like that at 16.
-Were you?
-I was not.
I had no idea what I wanted to do at 16.
She was just on the right track,
trying to get prepared for,
you know, what would come next.
She never got in any trouble,
according to her teachers and her family.
She didn't do anything
that would ever make her mother worry.
You know, she was she was a good girl.
So that morning, her family wakes up,
and Lashaya is gone.
Her mother begins to worry,
calls the police.
They kind of just like, "Maybe she'll come
home. We'll wait and see."
But there was no sense of urgency.
None of that.
Which I can relate to.
When I was kidnapped,
I was reported as a runaway.
My friends and family were saying,
"No, absolutely no way."
I can just only imagine now as a mother,
if you're sitting there, you're like, "No,
I know my daughter didn't run away."
[Cofer] Exactly.
And in Lashaya's case,
all of her belongings are still there.
Her ID, the charger for her phone,
all of her clothes.
The idea that she would be
running away with nothing is very strange.
So, what are the possible scenarios here?
Police have been receiving tips.
People have alleged
that they had seen Lashaya
at these, like, seedy motels
that were known for sex work
and people who were using drugs, and so
one of the theories is that Lashaya might
have possibly been trafficked.
There's a strong possibility that Lashaya
could still be alive somewhere.
That's my biggest hope.
Lashaya was discovered missing
by her mother Sabrina, and her siblings.
So I wanna start by talking to Sabrina
and Lashaya's brother, O'Shea.
-Hey, Sabrina?
-Hello.
-Hi.
-I'm Kara.
-Nice to meet you, Kara. How are you?
-Nice to meet you.
-Good. Hi, I'm Kara.
-Hey, how's it going?
-This is my oldest son, O'Shea.
-Nice to meet you.
-O'Shea? Nice to meet you.
-Yes.
[Sabrina] Can I get you guys some coffee?
-[O'Shea] Yes. Yes.
-Yeah, sure. That'd be great, thank you.
[Chamberlain] So, how old are you?
-[O'Shea] I am 31.
-Here's some cookies.
Oh. How sweet are you?
Just taking care of people. Oh, my gosh.
So, tell me about your family.
-How many kids were there?
-Six.
-Six kids. And you're the oldest?
-Mm-hmm.
[O'Shea] I'm the oldest, yeah.
It was chaotic and fun.
-Oh, my goodness.
-[Sabrina] Mm-hmm.
I worked my butt off
to take care of these guys.
Lashaya always helped
with the little ones,
-especially the baby baby.
-[Chamberlain] Mm-hmm.
She was really attached to him
from the day I brought him home.
She would take him to her room.
I'd be like "Where's my baby at?"
And he'd be downstairs with her.
[Lashaya laughing]
[baby laughs, coos]
She was always really helpful with cooking
-and she likes crafts.
-[Chamberlain] Mm-hmm.
So she had all this craft stuff to make
bracelets and all this kind of stuff.
And she'd make everybody bracelets.
That's just the way she was.
[O'Shea] She made me a key chain.
And when I first got my first car, I put
it right there on my mirror.
And it had a little cross on it.
I still have it to this day.
-I have it hung up in my closet right now.
-[Chamberlain] Oh, my gosh.
So every time I look at it, it's like,
"Wow, she really made that for me."
It sounds like she
kinda knew people's hearts.
Yeah, exactly.
[Chamberlain] Yeah.
[O'Shea] She thought everybody
was good because she's good,
and she just had that mentality that,
"Hey. Everybody's gonna be good."
[baby cooing]
[Sabrina] She was gonna be a nurse.
The year before she went missing,
she was invited to join a program.
So if she was to finish,
she would actually have a scholarship to
college in the medical field.
Wow. That's so cool.
[Sabrina] I didn't require her
to get a job
because I wanted her to focus
more on her academics.
But she'd really wanted to 'cause there
was stuff she wanted to get
-Mm-hmm.
-and prom and all that kind of stuff.
So she was thinking about that,
and I told her, "It's okay,
as long as, you know, we don't want it
to mess with your grades."
So the day Lashaya went missing,
she was interviewing
for a cashier position at a sub shop.
She was supposed to have the second
interview on the 15th at 11:00 a.m.
But she never showed up.
Tell me what happened that day.
-Well, I remember I was off from work.
-Mm-hmm.
And I remember telling Shaeron,
"Tell Lashaya to go ahead and get up."
He goes down to her room and
he comes back kinda casually,
and he's like, "Um,
she's not in her room, Mom."
I'm like, "Well, check the bathroom."
So he goes back down.
He comes back up and said, "Mom,
she's not in the bathroom."
Well, where is she?
So, I told him I said,
"Go back downstairs and check everywhere."
I'm calling her phone,
it is going straight to voicemail.
I walk out to the yard and I just started
screaming her name.
Still had my scrubs on
from the night before.
Me and Lashaya was watching movies until
two o'clock in the morning.
We've both went to bed at 2:00.
Now, I'm walking up
and down the block in my robe.
I'm really panicky.
That's when I decided to call the police.
I kept calling and they kept saying,
oh, they're really busy.
"We'll send an officer over
as soon as one is available."
They finally came at 8:00 p.m.
It was almost dark.
Hours later.
We told them that this is not like her.
Something's wrong.
They didn't believe us
when we told them that.
They were trying to say she was a runaway.
There was no reason for me to think that.
But they kept telling us that
over and over again.
That was the track
that was being followed.
I kept telling them she's not a runaway.
She left at 2:30 in the freaking morning.
She left her money and her wallet.
She took her jewelry off like
she was getting ready for bed.
Why would you leave your phone charger,
your money, your jewelry,
everything that
a runaway child would take?
No, she was going to bed.
[sobbing] And I thought
I was gonna die from grief.
Somebody took my sweet baby.
I fought with them for a week
when she went missing.
Kept telling them, "She's not a runaway."
I'm calling every day, trying to convince
them that something is wrong,
and they weren't listening to me.
Until the chief showed up at our house.
Then all the news stations came.
Aurora Police wanna push for more help
to find a missing teenager.
Lashaya was an honor student at
George Washington High School.
Her family has not been able to rest.
Somebody out there knows something.
[Chamberlain] The fact that Lashaya was
listed as runaway is actually something
that drives me crazy because
there's not the same urgency to find them.
But whether they willingly
or unwillingly left their home,
they're still an endangered missing person
that needs to be searched for.
I'm curious to see
what law enforcement's side is
of the investigation and what they found.
-I'm Kara. Nice to meet you.
-Nice to meet you.
-Jason.
-Nice to meet you.
-Yeah.
-You wanna have a seat?
-Yeah, sure.
-Great.
[Chamberlain] At what point did
you get involved in the case?
In 2022, I was assigned this case
as a cold-case detective
in the Homicide unit.
And I was a part
of the case from the beginning.
I worked in the unit that handled
all crimes against children
but also missing persons,
runaways, kidnappings,
anything along those lines.
So, there initially were signs or things
that made people think
that she was a runaway.
Can you tell me
a little bit more about that?
It's hard for me to say
some of these things.
You've got to keep in mind that
the Aurora Police Department
takes in over 1,200 runaway cases a year.
Every case was reviewed
by the detective sergeant.
But, you know, initially,
it's Mom wakes up,
16-year-old's not there,
there's no forced entry,
she did take her phone.
Did she just go to a friend's house?
Did she, you know, sneak out
to go meet with somebody?
Something along those lines.
And, um, you know, maybe she'll come home
this afternoon,
and that was kind of
where it sat at the beginning.
And when did that start to change?
Once Mom said, "Hey, you know, this is
very out of character for her,
and she didn't take
her cell phone charger,
she didn't pack a bag."
That was when it was like,
okay, all hands on deck.
We need to be out there
finding out what happened.
[Chamberlain] And what did you find?
[Faith] You know, Lashaya was a smart kid.
She was searching for jobs.
She was really close to her friends.
And then something that we learned talking
to her friends
was that she had an ex-boyfriend.
They were maybe on-again,
off-again a little bit,
and some of her friends didn't like him.
And she left that night to meet him and
talk to him about something.
As an investigator,
what does that make you think?
Hugely concerning.
[Sabrina] She had, like, little crushes as
she grew up, but nothing like this.
She told me about this young man
probably about three months
or so before she went missing.
When he first walked into the house,
he didn't speak to anyone.
He just stood there, staring at us.
I asked him, I said, "Hi, how you doing?"
I said, "I'm Lashaya's mom."
And he shook my hand and told me his name,
and that was basically it.
I did not want Lashaya talking to him.
He was just kind of like this odd guy.
And I guess some of her friends were like,
"Ew, why are you talking to him?"
Because this The things
that Lashaya was saying
and the way he would
talk to her, you know.
One minute he would want
to be her boyfriend,
and the next minute
he would tell her she was ugly
and that he didn't want to date her.
He was just really mean.
And so before she came up missing,
Lashaya told me that she wasn't
talking to him anymore.
And I believed her because there was no
more talks about him coming to visit her.
But that night, she was meeting with him.
My name's Chris Poppe.
I've been in law enforcement 29 years.
I remember getting
Lashaya's case in July of 2016.
We were able to track down the boyfriend.
He said the last time he had seen her was
the early morning on the 15th of July.
And then he started kinda
putting that timeline together for us.
He said that they met at the school around
two o'clock in the morning.
She had wanted to meet with him,
had something important to share with him.
And the ex-boyfriend said that they never
really got to that topic when they met.
She wanted him to sit down,
he didn't feel like sitting down.
They visited for about ten minutes,
and then they went their separate ways.
He explained to us that
he had walked to the west,
which was to the direction of his house.
As he was going that way,
he looked over his shoulder
and saw that she was walking
a different direction.
But we have no video evidence
to confirm that.
[dog barking in distance]
[Chamberlain] So, obviously, you looked
into his story further.
Why didn't he want to sit down?
[Jason] He said he had to wait
about a half hour
before Lashaya finally arrived,
and he was already
kinda irritated, he said,
'cause he didn't feel well.
His stomach was upset,
and it's 2:30 in the morning now.
And he just wanted to hear the news.
And so, ultimately, he left.
And after that,
did he try to reach out to her?
We learned through some cell phone records
later that he did reach out
back out to her after that,
and there was no response.
Wow.
So, this is all new information.
Did you find anything else
to support his story?
[Faith] Yes.
We used her cell phone records
from that night.
And we could see that
she had gone up to the school,
so we went along that route
and found her
on the video cameras
to the southeast of the school.
The time stamps on the video seem to match
with the boyfriend's story.
The video showed, you know, Lashaya
and this other person meeting.
I don't think we can state for certain,
based on the quality
of the video, that it was him,
but it matches
the story that he's telling.
And then, due to
the positioning of the camera,
the nighttime, the pixilation,
we're not really sure when
each of them leaves after that.
Wow. So there was never any video footage
of her walking back?
We have th-this map that we made
where the holes in
the video coverage are, right?
And so she could've walked north this way
or she could've walked east,
but she didn't come back
the way that she came.
And then later that morning,
her phone turned off a little bit away
from the school.
[Sabrina] They told me that
around six o'clock that morning
that her phone pinged close to the house.
Did someone take her
in front of the house?
Where did she go?
What happened?
[Chamberlain] It sounds like Lashaya's
phone was in multiple places that night,
but do we know that she was?
I'm thinking the best way to figure out
where she could've been going is
to visit the area where she was
last recorded on camera.
We're already a mile away
from North Middle School,
where the meeting between
Lashaya and her ex-boyfriend took place.
How close is this to where Lashaya lived?
About a mile and a half straight east
of where we're at right now.
-That's where she was living in 2016.
-Okay.
Okay.
[Jason] Over here,
there's not a lot of crime.
But once you cross the street,
and you enter these neighborhoods,
close to Colfax is
the troubled part of Aurora.
This is North Middle School right here,
and to our right is that alcove
where the meeting between
Lashaya and her ex-boyfriend took place.
-Oh. Right there?
-[Jason] Yes.
[Chamberlain] Where approximately
were they actually meeting?
Right about at the threshold
-of this alcove.
-Mm-hmm.
-You see Lashaya meet a figure.
-Someone.
And then, which direction does she leave?
We don't know.
It's assumed that she would've
disappeared into the alcove
There's no outlet.
but, it's just It becomes
too dark at that point,
-as she meets this figure
-Mmm.
which we assume is the ex-boyfriend.
-I don't see any cameras over here.
-No.
We had a command post set up
right here on 22nd.
Mm-hmm.
And we would've had police tape marking
off this immediate area
-Mmm.
-and canvassing of all the neighborhood
would've been down this way
and a few blocks that way and all of that
to look for cameras, to look for
witnesses, anybody that knew anything.
The following morning,
a gun and cell phone was found
on the northwest corner of this garden,
and it had not been there the day before.
The cell phone had a pink and white case.
It was described as the same color
as Lashaya's missing phone.
[Chamberlain] So the phone and the gun
weren't there on the first day? Wow.
Those items were turned over to the police
at the command center,
and that started
a whole new investigation.
That was a huge, uh, discovery.
Our initial thought was,
"Is this Lashaya's phone?"
And for there to be a gun next to it,
you know, was this used by
somebody in her disappearance?
So, we investigated those items,
and the gun that was found
belonged to a resident
that lived nearby the school.
So, investigators talked
to the resident and learned
that her car had been
broken into the previous night.
We processed those items for fingerprints
before returning them.
But, uh, nothing was found.
It's very strange for the cell phone and
gun to be taken from a car
and then discarded
in a police crime scene.
Was there an ulterior motive to
try to throw off investigators?
So, we did another canvass
for video cameras.
And at that time, more video cameras
were found that had footage
around the time
of Lashaya's disappearance.
So on the west side of the school,
there's a camera that at about 2:35,
which would've been about the time that
the meeting between Lashaya
and the ex-boyfriend would've ended,
and they would've parted ways,
that camera on the west side of the school
captured two individuals
walking southbound
-independently of each other
-Mmm.
-Mm-hmm.
-at right around that time frame.
-So, this isn't public?
-That's right.
Why come out with it now?
-Things like this show
-Yeah.
can help get that footage out.
If those people can be identified,
the public could really help us out here.
[Chamberlain] What can you tell
from the video?
First, you see one individual
that's clearly a male,
looks Caucasian, short hair,
kinda heavyset, walking southbound.
And about 30 to 40 seconds later,
you see a second individual
walking the same direction.
You can't make out, though, the person's
race or sex, anything else about them.
And there was nothing suspicious observed
in their walking behavior,
and they were by themselves.
Could one of them be her ex-boyfriend?
No reason to believe it's him.
He's very small.
But we think these two people,
they may have seen something,
they may have heard something,
may have been involved,
but we just don't know.
[Chamberlain]
I wonder who those people are.
A lot of people on Reddit are
talking about the possibility
that she was trafficked.
Could these people in the video
have done something like that to Lashaya?
This is someone who says,
"She was my friend. She was great.
Two of my best friends at the time saw her
after her disappearance.
I wish we could've done more,
but all we did was call the police."
Saw her where?
A lot of these posts reference sightings
of Lashaya reported
in the Colfax Avenue area of Aurora.
Witnesses stated that the girl resembling
Lashaya was being kept drugged
and forced into sex work.
Colfax is not that far from
the school. It's possible.
And what keeps coming up
in a lot of these tips is that
Lashaya was being kept by someone that
everyone in the Colfax area was afraid of.
No one wanted to be
the person to go against him.
Knowing all of that, how difficult it
would be for her to escape,
is what makes this the kind
of tip that's really hard to follow up on.
Because most people
that escape trafficking,
they're afraid of getting
in trouble themselves,
and so they usually report
these things anonymously.
A lot of these people are saying they got
in touch with Lashaya's mom, Sabrina.
I can't prove any of this
from behind a laptop,
but there's too much here
pointing in the same direction to ignore.
I wanna talk more with Lashaya's family
about some of the leads
they received about her.
-Michelle, nice to meet you.
-Nice to meet you.
-Come on in.
-[Chamberlain] Hello again.
-Go ahead, have a seat.
-Oh, my goodness.
-So, you're Lashaya's brother, right?
-Brother, right.
Okay, so, y-you are the brother that was,
like, close to her in age, right?
What's your take on all of this?
Well, the first day,
I remember getting into my car
and just going around the church
'cause I thought
if she was gonna be anywhere,
I knew she would probably
be at the church.
I didn't see anything.
Then I went around
where her boyfriend stayed at.
Honestly, I thought it was
her boyfriend at the time.
That didn't turn into nothing.
You know, when you see things like this
on, you know, documentaries or whatever,
you never once think
that that's, you know
It can happen to you,
you know what I mean?
It just hurts.
[Sabrina] And we printed out flyers,
and we started going around.
[Ebony] We dropped everything,
and we just went around,
like, looking, calling
Me and my cousins, Shaeron and O'Shea,
used to go to the truck stops
and just sit out and, like, wait, looking
at everybody suspiciously.
"Where is she? Where is she?"
Circling around.
[Sabrina] Close to that area
that she was seen on the video,
it's a really bad strip.
It's a lot of prostitution over there.
There are people out there
that take young girls and traffic them.
We were getting a lot of tips
from people saying,
"Trafficking. She's being prostituted."
It was so many people telling us that.
It was constant.
We actually had an interview
with a real pimp.
He told us, "As long
as you don't call the police,
I'll tell you everything
you need to know."
They said, "Listen, we've been
talking to this guy down there.
He told us that, you know, one of his
girls actually saw Lashaya on Colfax
and that he's willing to talk to you,
but he said absolutely no police."
They was like, "Are you ready to do that?"
And I told them, "Yeah, let's go."
So I got in their car, we drove down
to one of the motels.
We went in there.
We were there for like a hour.
Real run-down, nasty motel.
Nasty-looking guy.
Did he say he'd seen her?
He basically just told us that,
"Yeah, your daughter is being trafficked,
and that the guy that's trafficking her
goes by the name D."
He said from what he was told that night,
my daughter was being held in that motel.
And we marched past
that thing more than once.
And they said she was being held in there.
And then he was like,
"You guys better get off from down here,
before they send her to another state."
It had been days before.
That was the main problem the whole time.
Somebody would wait a week and say,
"Yeah, I did see your daughter
here with this guy.
This what they call him. His name is D."
And it's like, "Who's D?"
That's so frustrating.
It's like you're just
constantly chasing again.
Always, we were.
We were always one step behind.
[Sabrina] But people were
still posting online.
There were multiple
supposed sightings of Lashaya.
Authorities had in fact, at this point,
brought in the FBI.
They were working with
If you are scared to come forward,
if you're someone who knows
something, please do so.
Police just want to know what happened.
[Jason] So, the next light
is Colfax Avenue.
Do you guys see a lot
of trafficking happening here?
[Jason] Well, every one of these motels
that we've seen, like,
literally had officer-involved shootings
involving search warrant executions
of drug dealers
and trafficking operations.
That's definitely
what I would assume is going on
in a lot of these
pay-by-the-hour kind of places.
Was there anything in Lashaya's case
that led you to believe
that maybe she may have been
a victim of trafficking?
Only the tips that came in.
And it was in this stretch
between Peoria and Yosemite,
there were multiple sightings of her.
So, we went to those locations,
checked with management,
find out the list of the people
who were staying there,
find out if they have video cameras.
But we were unable to verify any of them.
But it doesn't mean it didn't occur.
Got it, because people
who stay in these motels
often live transient lifestyles.
[Jason] They do.
So, it's possible
that Lashaya was out here?
[Jason] It's definitely possible.
[news reporter 6]
Police received information
that's cause for greater concern,
but they won't say what that is.
But they are treating
Lashaya's disappearance as suspicious.
Human trafficking victims
are very rarely snatched off the street
and forced into a trafficking situation
like the movie Taken.
How it usually happens is grooming.
So, we were looking all through
her social media and checking,
you know, is she communicating with people
that her family doesn't know about?
And we found, she was having
an online relationship chat
with someone in California.
They were having flirtatious
conversation back and forth.
No one knew about the relationship.
The thing about online messaging
is someone could say,
"Hey, I'm 16 years old,"
and it turns out they're actually 30
and have nefarious intent.
The concern with that was that
maybe it was something leading
towards a trafficking situation.
So, we contacted law enforcement
out there in California.
We had to find out what was going on.
We weren't sure who this person was.
We found the person
that she was talking to in California.
We were able to talk to him.
And it turned out
he hadn't left the state,
and he was actually 14 or 15.
Their communications were
age-appropriate flirting.
You know, he wasn't asking her
to come out to California
so that he could pimp her
or anything like that.
[Chamberlain] At this point, there are
still so many questions.
Most of the tips I've heard have been in
connection with Lashaya being trafficked.
From what I'm seeing on social media,
most people are not aware that the person
that Lashaya was meeting that night
was her ex-boyfriend.
They don't even know she was at the school
because the video of her there
hasn't even been released.
I realize in an active investigation,
it's important for law enforcement to keep
some information private,
but let's see what else
I can piece together.
So, this is an article
from 9News from 2020,
and it says, "Aurora Police
have completed a search at an Aurora house
possibly connected
to the case of a teenage girl
who went missing
more than four years ago."
It says they were taking
concrete out of the house,
which could indicate remains of some kind.
I wonder if she had a connection
to anyone who lived here.
[news reporter 7] A tip led officers here,
and officers say that
she knew the family that lived
in that home four years ago,
but it was not the focus
of the investigation until now.
So she did know the family.
I'm wondering why they took that concrete.
I think my biggest question is,
whose house was this?
[Jason] Can't rule anybody out
till we find her.
The ex-boyfriend was the last person
to have seen her.
Friends said they didn't have
the best relationship,
so he had to remain a person of interest.
They ex-boyfriend's parents
were also spoken to.
Turned out that the father did not approve
of his son dating African-American girls.
The ex-boyfriend's father was
African-American and his wife was white.
He wished his son to date white girls.
And so the fact that
his son was dating Lashaya at some point
raised eyebrows
with the police investigation.
[Faith] So, the ex-boyfriend
said that Lashaya had told him
she had this news she had to share,
but wouldn't tell him what it was.
And I thought, if there was
a world where maybe this news
that Lashaya had to give
was disruptive to that family,
then maybe there was a motive.
During the conversation
with the boyfriend,
investigators noticed he had
some scratches on his arm.
And he told the investigators
that when Lashaya wanted him to sit down,
she had grabbed his arm
and kind of pulled him down.
And he said that's what
those marks were from.
It's obviously a little suspicious.
So, we're thinking,
maybe this important news that Lashaya had
to tell her ex-boyfriend
was that she's pregnant.
[Faith] Sabrina thought
that Lashaya was menstruating,
but Lashaya and her boyfriend
had this weird relationship.
It was pretty age-appropriate,
but the boyfriend told Lashaya
he had cancer,
even though he didn't have cancer.
So, she could have been saying she was
pregnant, even if she wasn't pregnant.
That would have caused
great concern, obviously,
for the ex-boyfriend,
as well as his father,
who didn't approve of him dating
African-American girls in the first place.
And then around that time
Lashaya disappeared,
there was reports of blocks of concrete
being removed from the home by the dad.
The ex-boyfriend's father put 'em into a
dumpster that was outside the residence.
And they thought, well,
maybe he's busted up the basement floor
to bury her in dirt beneath the concrete.
We didn't have enough probable cause to
believe that a crime was committed
to support the search warrant.
We continued to monitor that house,
and several years later, in 2020,
the f-the family was
no longer living there.
And the owner of the house gave us consent
to do more of a search of that house
to see if there was any evidence
that Lashaya had been there.
[news reporter 8]
Aurora police were seen in 2020
searching a vacant house in connection
with her disappearance.
Cadaver dogs did an alert
at an area in the basement.
I thought maybe we finally
are gonna get some answers.
They break up concrete,
um, and then we look through it, right?
We can sift through it.
So, we dug up that concrete
where the dogs had alerted.
Lashaya was not under the concrete.
There was nothing but hardpack.
I don't know what the dogs found,
but I learned that cadaver dogs
can hit on graves from the Civil War.
[Poppe] It was a dead end.
But even though we didn't find anything
during the search of the basement,
it didn't rule out anyone.
[Chamberlain] With the evidence I've seen,
it's impossible to know for sure
what happened
the night Lashaya disappeared.
Did her meetup with her ex-boyfriend go as
he described it to the police?
Or did something else happen
in the schoolyard?
And are there other people involved?
He ended up at his house,
and her phone pinged near her house,
but was she with it?
Really, I just I wanna
ask him what happened.
[line ringing]
Hi, my name is Kara.
I am investigating
Lashaya Stine's disappearance.
Can I ask you a few questions
about Lashaya?
Lashaya's ex-boyfriend didn't want to be
recorded or answer my questions,
and I have mixed feelings about that.
I think most people who don't have
anything to hide would want to talk.
But when this happened,
both he and Lashaya were teenagers.
And having been a teenager
when I went through something traumatic,
I know that very often
you don't have the ability,
the coping mechanisms,
to deal with what happens.
When I looked at my friends and family
and my boyfriend at the time
and how they dealt with me being missing,
and my ex-boyfriend, for example,
did not ever publicly share
what he went through
until he did my documentary.
But, of course, the hope
is that Lashaya's ex-boyfriend
would have more information
about what happened to Lashaya.
I have so much to update you on,
and a lot of this is new information
that hasn't been released.
We do know that Lashaya was going to meet
her ex-boyfriend
the night she went missing.
-Wow.
-They were meeting up at a school,
which is actually right there
by the area where she was walking.
She needed to talk to him about something,
but he says that he just left
before he even got the opportunity
to hear this thing
that she wanted to tell him.
That's very strange. Um
Obviously, we had no idea
that she had planned to go and meet him,
so that answers a big question.
So, then I have to wonder,
"What is it that she was telling him?"
-Yeah.
-"Did
Was it something that
his dad wouldn't approve of?"
Could it have been, yeah,
something that, yeah, was gonna affect him
in a way that,
you know, he didn't want it to affect him.
Law enforcement and the FBI were searching
the ex-boyfriend's house.
Cadaver dogs alerted in the basement
to the presence
of some kind of human remains.
And so the FBI actually was removing the
concrete to go get it tested.
And it turned out that
it was not connected.
Yeah, and that's good to know, you know,
that they are following,
you know, the leads that they're getting.
My gut's telling me
there's just something more to the story.
They did find another video
of two individuals walking away
from the area of the school
at the same time that Lashaya was
allegedly leaving this area.
So, could it be connected?
Or could they have seen something?
That's just crazy.
Now is the time to come forward.
Every day, I hold out hope
that she's okay.
And I hold out hope that she's doing well.
I hold out hope that she will
come home to her family.
I hold out hope that
that my sister will have
her daughter back,
and that my nephews
will have their sister back,
and that their children
will get to meet their auntie.
[Sabrina] I just want to know,
if she is alive, where is she?
And if she's not alive,
I wanna know, "How?"
And is there a way that
we could recover her remains?
I want closure.
[Chamberlain] Lashaya's case
has been open for ten years,
and every single day,
her family has to deal
with not knowing what happened.
I want to get Lashaya's family the answers
and the peace that they deserve.
Somebody saw something that night.
Somebody knows where she is.
And I hope that sharing
her story and her face
jogs the memory of the person
that has that information.
If you have any new information
about Lashaya's case,
please call law enforcement directly.
Visit the Somebody Knows Something
channel on abcnews.com
for further discussion
about Lashaya's case.
[person] His car was found
in the Las Vegas area.
We had no idea why Steven was there.
[Chamberlain] Does he tell anyone what
he's doing on these road trips?
[person 2] It was definitely a secret.
[Harlowe] Steven was raised Mormon,
so he wouldn't gamble, he wouldn't drink.
[person 3] If there was
something that he was hiding,
anything could be on the table
as a possibility.
-[baby cooing]
[news reporter] Lashaya Stine
left their family home
around 2 a.m. on July 15th
and never came back.
Somebody out there knows something.
[Chamberlain] Lashaya Stine was
just 16 when she disappeared.
Since then, the Internet hasn't stopped
talking about it.
She thought that she was coming back,
but somebody had to have killed her.
Some people even said that
she was being moved across state lines.
Tips began to flood in.
"Lashaya was at a bus stop."
"Lashaya's at a party."
"I saw Lashaya with this man."
[Chamberlain]
Some believe she was kidnapped.
He basically just told us that, "Yeah,
your daughter was being trafficked."
[Chamberlain]
The truth could even be darker.
The following morning,
a gun and cell phone was found,
and it had not been there the day before.
We learned that she had an ex-boyfriend.
I did not want Lashaya talking to him.
[Cofer] Police have been receiving tips.
People that have seen Lashaya
at these seedy motels.
A lot of this is new information
that hasn't been released.
Every year, more than 600,000 people
go missing in the United States.
[news reporter 3] The story of Jaycee
Dugard shocked the nation.
Amy Bradley simply disappeared
without a trace.
Asha Degree went to bed one night
and was gone in the morning.
I'm Kara Robinson Chamberlain,
and in 2002,
I was one of those victims.
[news reporter 4] At just 15 years old,
Kara was abducted by a serial killer.
[news reporter 5] Assaulted
and tortured for 18 hours,
but somehow she managed to escape.
I went on to a career in law enforcement.
[Lott] Then she wanted to be
a victim advocate
and show them how they can be
a survivor like her.
Now I'm investigating the cases
true crime fans are obsessed with.
Because there are people who don't know
what happened to their loved ones.
Somebody knows something.
Somebody saw something.
And if I can bring
one person some answers,
then it's worth everything.
[suspenseful music playing]
Lashaya Stine is a 16-year-old girl who
went missing from Aurora, Colorado.
In the middle of the night,
she disappeared from her bedroom
in the basement of her family's home.
And since then, people online
have been speculating why.
When Lashaya went missing, she only had
her phone, she didn't take clothes.
[person 1] Someone lured her
from her home that night,
and she had no idea
that she would never come back.
The window to her room was found open,
so it was assumed she left through it.
Possibly voluntarily, possibly not.
Amara Cofer covered Lashaya's case.
[Facetime ringtone]
-Hi!
-How are you?
I'm good. So, this case
Yeah, this is one, you know,
I-I did it a couple years ago,
but it's a story that stayed with me,
and there's still no answers
about what happened to Lashaya.
So tell me a little bit about Lashaya.
[Cofer] She was your normal,
average teenager.
She was a good student.
She was top of her class.
She had dreams of becoming a nurse.
She had been accepted into an internship
at the University of Colorado,
and she was making plans for college.
To have the discipline
to go after an internship,
that speaks very highly of her upbringing,
her character.
I was not like that at 16.
-Were you?
-I was not.
I had no idea what I wanted to do at 16.
She was just on the right track,
trying to get prepared for,
you know, what would come next.
She never got in any trouble,
according to her teachers and her family.
She didn't do anything
that would ever make her mother worry.
You know, she was she was a good girl.
So that morning, her family wakes up,
and Lashaya is gone.
Her mother begins to worry,
calls the police.
They kind of just like, "Maybe she'll come
home. We'll wait and see."
But there was no sense of urgency.
None of that.
Which I can relate to.
When I was kidnapped,
I was reported as a runaway.
My friends and family were saying,
"No, absolutely no way."
I can just only imagine now as a mother,
if you're sitting there, you're like, "No,
I know my daughter didn't run away."
[Cofer] Exactly.
And in Lashaya's case,
all of her belongings are still there.
Her ID, the charger for her phone,
all of her clothes.
The idea that she would be
running away with nothing is very strange.
So, what are the possible scenarios here?
Police have been receiving tips.
People have alleged
that they had seen Lashaya
at these, like, seedy motels
that were known for sex work
and people who were using drugs, and so
one of the theories is that Lashaya might
have possibly been trafficked.
There's a strong possibility that Lashaya
could still be alive somewhere.
That's my biggest hope.
Lashaya was discovered missing
by her mother Sabrina, and her siblings.
So I wanna start by talking to Sabrina
and Lashaya's brother, O'Shea.
-Hey, Sabrina?
-Hello.
-Hi.
-I'm Kara.
-Nice to meet you, Kara. How are you?
-Nice to meet you.
-Good. Hi, I'm Kara.
-Hey, how's it going?
-This is my oldest son, O'Shea.
-Nice to meet you.
-O'Shea? Nice to meet you.
-Yes.
[Sabrina] Can I get you guys some coffee?
-[O'Shea] Yes. Yes.
-Yeah, sure. That'd be great, thank you.
[Chamberlain] So, how old are you?
-[O'Shea] I am 31.
-Here's some cookies.
Oh. How sweet are you?
Just taking care of people. Oh, my gosh.
So, tell me about your family.
-How many kids were there?
-Six.
-Six kids. And you're the oldest?
-Mm-hmm.
[O'Shea] I'm the oldest, yeah.
It was chaotic and fun.
-Oh, my goodness.
-[Sabrina] Mm-hmm.
I worked my butt off
to take care of these guys.
Lashaya always helped
with the little ones,
-especially the baby baby.
-[Chamberlain] Mm-hmm.
She was really attached to him
from the day I brought him home.
She would take him to her room.
I'd be like "Where's my baby at?"
And he'd be downstairs with her.
[Lashaya laughing]
[baby laughs, coos]
She was always really helpful with cooking
-and she likes crafts.
-[Chamberlain] Mm-hmm.
So she had all this craft stuff to make
bracelets and all this kind of stuff.
And she'd make everybody bracelets.
That's just the way she was.
[O'Shea] She made me a key chain.
And when I first got my first car, I put
it right there on my mirror.
And it had a little cross on it.
I still have it to this day.
-I have it hung up in my closet right now.
-[Chamberlain] Oh, my gosh.
So every time I look at it, it's like,
"Wow, she really made that for me."
It sounds like she
kinda knew people's hearts.
Yeah, exactly.
[Chamberlain] Yeah.
[O'Shea] She thought everybody
was good because she's good,
and she just had that mentality that,
"Hey. Everybody's gonna be good."
[baby cooing]
[Sabrina] She was gonna be a nurse.
The year before she went missing,
she was invited to join a program.
So if she was to finish,
she would actually have a scholarship to
college in the medical field.
Wow. That's so cool.
[Sabrina] I didn't require her
to get a job
because I wanted her to focus
more on her academics.
But she'd really wanted to 'cause there
was stuff she wanted to get
-Mm-hmm.
-and prom and all that kind of stuff.
So she was thinking about that,
and I told her, "It's okay,
as long as, you know, we don't want it
to mess with your grades."
So the day Lashaya went missing,
she was interviewing
for a cashier position at a sub shop.
She was supposed to have the second
interview on the 15th at 11:00 a.m.
But she never showed up.
Tell me what happened that day.
-Well, I remember I was off from work.
-Mm-hmm.
And I remember telling Shaeron,
"Tell Lashaya to go ahead and get up."
He goes down to her room and
he comes back kinda casually,
and he's like, "Um,
she's not in her room, Mom."
I'm like, "Well, check the bathroom."
So he goes back down.
He comes back up and said, "Mom,
she's not in the bathroom."
Well, where is she?
So, I told him I said,
"Go back downstairs and check everywhere."
I'm calling her phone,
it is going straight to voicemail.
I walk out to the yard and I just started
screaming her name.
Still had my scrubs on
from the night before.
Me and Lashaya was watching movies until
two o'clock in the morning.
We've both went to bed at 2:00.
Now, I'm walking up
and down the block in my robe.
I'm really panicky.
That's when I decided to call the police.
I kept calling and they kept saying,
oh, they're really busy.
"We'll send an officer over
as soon as one is available."
They finally came at 8:00 p.m.
It was almost dark.
Hours later.
We told them that this is not like her.
Something's wrong.
They didn't believe us
when we told them that.
They were trying to say she was a runaway.
There was no reason for me to think that.
But they kept telling us that
over and over again.
That was the track
that was being followed.
I kept telling them she's not a runaway.
She left at 2:30 in the freaking morning.
She left her money and her wallet.
She took her jewelry off like
she was getting ready for bed.
Why would you leave your phone charger,
your money, your jewelry,
everything that
a runaway child would take?
No, she was going to bed.
[sobbing] And I thought
I was gonna die from grief.
Somebody took my sweet baby.
I fought with them for a week
when she went missing.
Kept telling them, "She's not a runaway."
I'm calling every day, trying to convince
them that something is wrong,
and they weren't listening to me.
Until the chief showed up at our house.
Then all the news stations came.
Aurora Police wanna push for more help
to find a missing teenager.
Lashaya was an honor student at
George Washington High School.
Her family has not been able to rest.
Somebody out there knows something.
[Chamberlain] The fact that Lashaya was
listed as runaway is actually something
that drives me crazy because
there's not the same urgency to find them.
But whether they willingly
or unwillingly left their home,
they're still an endangered missing person
that needs to be searched for.
I'm curious to see
what law enforcement's side is
of the investigation and what they found.
-I'm Kara. Nice to meet you.
-Nice to meet you.
-Jason.
-Nice to meet you.
-Yeah.
-You wanna have a seat?
-Yeah, sure.
-Great.
[Chamberlain] At what point did
you get involved in the case?
In 2022, I was assigned this case
as a cold-case detective
in the Homicide unit.
And I was a part
of the case from the beginning.
I worked in the unit that handled
all crimes against children
but also missing persons,
runaways, kidnappings,
anything along those lines.
So, there initially were signs or things
that made people think
that she was a runaway.
Can you tell me
a little bit more about that?
It's hard for me to say
some of these things.
You've got to keep in mind that
the Aurora Police Department
takes in over 1,200 runaway cases a year.
Every case was reviewed
by the detective sergeant.
But, you know, initially,
it's Mom wakes up,
16-year-old's not there,
there's no forced entry,
she did take her phone.
Did she just go to a friend's house?
Did she, you know, sneak out
to go meet with somebody?
Something along those lines.
And, um, you know, maybe she'll come home
this afternoon,
and that was kind of
where it sat at the beginning.
And when did that start to change?
Once Mom said, "Hey, you know, this is
very out of character for her,
and she didn't take
her cell phone charger,
she didn't pack a bag."
That was when it was like,
okay, all hands on deck.
We need to be out there
finding out what happened.
[Chamberlain] And what did you find?
[Faith] You know, Lashaya was a smart kid.
She was searching for jobs.
She was really close to her friends.
And then something that we learned talking
to her friends
was that she had an ex-boyfriend.
They were maybe on-again,
off-again a little bit,
and some of her friends didn't like him.
And she left that night to meet him and
talk to him about something.
As an investigator,
what does that make you think?
Hugely concerning.
[Sabrina] She had, like, little crushes as
she grew up, but nothing like this.
She told me about this young man
probably about three months
or so before she went missing.
When he first walked into the house,
he didn't speak to anyone.
He just stood there, staring at us.
I asked him, I said, "Hi, how you doing?"
I said, "I'm Lashaya's mom."
And he shook my hand and told me his name,
and that was basically it.
I did not want Lashaya talking to him.
He was just kind of like this odd guy.
And I guess some of her friends were like,
"Ew, why are you talking to him?"
Because this The things
that Lashaya was saying
and the way he would
talk to her, you know.
One minute he would want
to be her boyfriend,
and the next minute
he would tell her she was ugly
and that he didn't want to date her.
He was just really mean.
And so before she came up missing,
Lashaya told me that she wasn't
talking to him anymore.
And I believed her because there was no
more talks about him coming to visit her.
But that night, she was meeting with him.
My name's Chris Poppe.
I've been in law enforcement 29 years.
I remember getting
Lashaya's case in July of 2016.
We were able to track down the boyfriend.
He said the last time he had seen her was
the early morning on the 15th of July.
And then he started kinda
putting that timeline together for us.
He said that they met at the school around
two o'clock in the morning.
She had wanted to meet with him,
had something important to share with him.
And the ex-boyfriend said that they never
really got to that topic when they met.
She wanted him to sit down,
he didn't feel like sitting down.
They visited for about ten minutes,
and then they went their separate ways.
He explained to us that
he had walked to the west,
which was to the direction of his house.
As he was going that way,
he looked over his shoulder
and saw that she was walking
a different direction.
But we have no video evidence
to confirm that.
[dog barking in distance]
[Chamberlain] So, obviously, you looked
into his story further.
Why didn't he want to sit down?
[Jason] He said he had to wait
about a half hour
before Lashaya finally arrived,
and he was already
kinda irritated, he said,
'cause he didn't feel well.
His stomach was upset,
and it's 2:30 in the morning now.
And he just wanted to hear the news.
And so, ultimately, he left.
And after that,
did he try to reach out to her?
We learned through some cell phone records
later that he did reach out
back out to her after that,
and there was no response.
Wow.
So, this is all new information.
Did you find anything else
to support his story?
[Faith] Yes.
We used her cell phone records
from that night.
And we could see that
she had gone up to the school,
so we went along that route
and found her
on the video cameras
to the southeast of the school.
The time stamps on the video seem to match
with the boyfriend's story.
The video showed, you know, Lashaya
and this other person meeting.
I don't think we can state for certain,
based on the quality
of the video, that it was him,
but it matches
the story that he's telling.
And then, due to
the positioning of the camera,
the nighttime, the pixilation,
we're not really sure when
each of them leaves after that.
Wow. So there was never any video footage
of her walking back?
We have th-this map that we made
where the holes in
the video coverage are, right?
And so she could've walked north this way
or she could've walked east,
but she didn't come back
the way that she came.
And then later that morning,
her phone turned off a little bit away
from the school.
[Sabrina] They told me that
around six o'clock that morning
that her phone pinged close to the house.
Did someone take her
in front of the house?
Where did she go?
What happened?
[Chamberlain] It sounds like Lashaya's
phone was in multiple places that night,
but do we know that she was?
I'm thinking the best way to figure out
where she could've been going is
to visit the area where she was
last recorded on camera.
We're already a mile away
from North Middle School,
where the meeting between
Lashaya and her ex-boyfriend took place.
How close is this to where Lashaya lived?
About a mile and a half straight east
of where we're at right now.
-That's where she was living in 2016.
-Okay.
Okay.
[Jason] Over here,
there's not a lot of crime.
But once you cross the street,
and you enter these neighborhoods,
close to Colfax is
the troubled part of Aurora.
This is North Middle School right here,
and to our right is that alcove
where the meeting between
Lashaya and her ex-boyfriend took place.
-Oh. Right there?
-[Jason] Yes.
[Chamberlain] Where approximately
were they actually meeting?
Right about at the threshold
-of this alcove.
-Mm-hmm.
-You see Lashaya meet a figure.
-Someone.
And then, which direction does she leave?
We don't know.
It's assumed that she would've
disappeared into the alcove
There's no outlet.
but, it's just It becomes
too dark at that point,
-as she meets this figure
-Mmm.
which we assume is the ex-boyfriend.
-I don't see any cameras over here.
-No.
We had a command post set up
right here on 22nd.
Mm-hmm.
And we would've had police tape marking
off this immediate area
-Mmm.
-and canvassing of all the neighborhood
would've been down this way
and a few blocks that way and all of that
to look for cameras, to look for
witnesses, anybody that knew anything.
The following morning,
a gun and cell phone was found
on the northwest corner of this garden,
and it had not been there the day before.
The cell phone had a pink and white case.
It was described as the same color
as Lashaya's missing phone.
[Chamberlain] So the phone and the gun
weren't there on the first day? Wow.
Those items were turned over to the police
at the command center,
and that started
a whole new investigation.
That was a huge, uh, discovery.
Our initial thought was,
"Is this Lashaya's phone?"
And for there to be a gun next to it,
you know, was this used by
somebody in her disappearance?
So, we investigated those items,
and the gun that was found
belonged to a resident
that lived nearby the school.
So, investigators talked
to the resident and learned
that her car had been
broken into the previous night.
We processed those items for fingerprints
before returning them.
But, uh, nothing was found.
It's very strange for the cell phone and
gun to be taken from a car
and then discarded
in a police crime scene.
Was there an ulterior motive to
try to throw off investigators?
So, we did another canvass
for video cameras.
And at that time, more video cameras
were found that had footage
around the time
of Lashaya's disappearance.
So on the west side of the school,
there's a camera that at about 2:35,
which would've been about the time that
the meeting between Lashaya
and the ex-boyfriend would've ended,
and they would've parted ways,
that camera on the west side of the school
captured two individuals
walking southbound
-independently of each other
-Mmm.
-Mm-hmm.
-at right around that time frame.
-So, this isn't public?
-That's right.
Why come out with it now?
-Things like this show
-Yeah.
can help get that footage out.
If those people can be identified,
the public could really help us out here.
[Chamberlain] What can you tell
from the video?
First, you see one individual
that's clearly a male,
looks Caucasian, short hair,
kinda heavyset, walking southbound.
And about 30 to 40 seconds later,
you see a second individual
walking the same direction.
You can't make out, though, the person's
race or sex, anything else about them.
And there was nothing suspicious observed
in their walking behavior,
and they were by themselves.
Could one of them be her ex-boyfriend?
No reason to believe it's him.
He's very small.
But we think these two people,
they may have seen something,
they may have heard something,
may have been involved,
but we just don't know.
[Chamberlain]
I wonder who those people are.
A lot of people on Reddit are
talking about the possibility
that she was trafficked.
Could these people in the video
have done something like that to Lashaya?
This is someone who says,
"She was my friend. She was great.
Two of my best friends at the time saw her
after her disappearance.
I wish we could've done more,
but all we did was call the police."
Saw her where?
A lot of these posts reference sightings
of Lashaya reported
in the Colfax Avenue area of Aurora.
Witnesses stated that the girl resembling
Lashaya was being kept drugged
and forced into sex work.
Colfax is not that far from
the school. It's possible.
And what keeps coming up
in a lot of these tips is that
Lashaya was being kept by someone that
everyone in the Colfax area was afraid of.
No one wanted to be
the person to go against him.
Knowing all of that, how difficult it
would be for her to escape,
is what makes this the kind
of tip that's really hard to follow up on.
Because most people
that escape trafficking,
they're afraid of getting
in trouble themselves,
and so they usually report
these things anonymously.
A lot of these people are saying they got
in touch with Lashaya's mom, Sabrina.
I can't prove any of this
from behind a laptop,
but there's too much here
pointing in the same direction to ignore.
I wanna talk more with Lashaya's family
about some of the leads
they received about her.
-Michelle, nice to meet you.
-Nice to meet you.
-Come on in.
-[Chamberlain] Hello again.
-Go ahead, have a seat.
-Oh, my goodness.
-So, you're Lashaya's brother, right?
-Brother, right.
Okay, so, y-you are the brother that was,
like, close to her in age, right?
What's your take on all of this?
Well, the first day,
I remember getting into my car
and just going around the church
'cause I thought
if she was gonna be anywhere,
I knew she would probably
be at the church.
I didn't see anything.
Then I went around
where her boyfriend stayed at.
Honestly, I thought it was
her boyfriend at the time.
That didn't turn into nothing.
You know, when you see things like this
on, you know, documentaries or whatever,
you never once think
that that's, you know
It can happen to you,
you know what I mean?
It just hurts.
[Sabrina] And we printed out flyers,
and we started going around.
[Ebony] We dropped everything,
and we just went around,
like, looking, calling
Me and my cousins, Shaeron and O'Shea,
used to go to the truck stops
and just sit out and, like, wait, looking
at everybody suspiciously.
"Where is she? Where is she?"
Circling around.
[Sabrina] Close to that area
that she was seen on the video,
it's a really bad strip.
It's a lot of prostitution over there.
There are people out there
that take young girls and traffic them.
We were getting a lot of tips
from people saying,
"Trafficking. She's being prostituted."
It was so many people telling us that.
It was constant.
We actually had an interview
with a real pimp.
He told us, "As long
as you don't call the police,
I'll tell you everything
you need to know."
They said, "Listen, we've been
talking to this guy down there.
He told us that, you know, one of his
girls actually saw Lashaya on Colfax
and that he's willing to talk to you,
but he said absolutely no police."
They was like, "Are you ready to do that?"
And I told them, "Yeah, let's go."
So I got in their car, we drove down
to one of the motels.
We went in there.
We were there for like a hour.
Real run-down, nasty motel.
Nasty-looking guy.
Did he say he'd seen her?
He basically just told us that,
"Yeah, your daughter is being trafficked,
and that the guy that's trafficking her
goes by the name D."
He said from what he was told that night,
my daughter was being held in that motel.
And we marched past
that thing more than once.
And they said she was being held in there.
And then he was like,
"You guys better get off from down here,
before they send her to another state."
It had been days before.
That was the main problem the whole time.
Somebody would wait a week and say,
"Yeah, I did see your daughter
here with this guy.
This what they call him. His name is D."
And it's like, "Who's D?"
That's so frustrating.
It's like you're just
constantly chasing again.
Always, we were.
We were always one step behind.
[Sabrina] But people were
still posting online.
There were multiple
supposed sightings of Lashaya.
Authorities had in fact, at this point,
brought in the FBI.
They were working with
If you are scared to come forward,
if you're someone who knows
something, please do so.
Police just want to know what happened.
[Jason] So, the next light
is Colfax Avenue.
Do you guys see a lot
of trafficking happening here?
[Jason] Well, every one of these motels
that we've seen, like,
literally had officer-involved shootings
involving search warrant executions
of drug dealers
and trafficking operations.
That's definitely
what I would assume is going on
in a lot of these
pay-by-the-hour kind of places.
Was there anything in Lashaya's case
that led you to believe
that maybe she may have been
a victim of trafficking?
Only the tips that came in.
And it was in this stretch
between Peoria and Yosemite,
there were multiple sightings of her.
So, we went to those locations,
checked with management,
find out the list of the people
who were staying there,
find out if they have video cameras.
But we were unable to verify any of them.
But it doesn't mean it didn't occur.
Got it, because people
who stay in these motels
often live transient lifestyles.
[Jason] They do.
So, it's possible
that Lashaya was out here?
[Jason] It's definitely possible.
[news reporter 6]
Police received information
that's cause for greater concern,
but they won't say what that is.
But they are treating
Lashaya's disappearance as suspicious.
Human trafficking victims
are very rarely snatched off the street
and forced into a trafficking situation
like the movie Taken.
How it usually happens is grooming.
So, we were looking all through
her social media and checking,
you know, is she communicating with people
that her family doesn't know about?
And we found, she was having
an online relationship chat
with someone in California.
They were having flirtatious
conversation back and forth.
No one knew about the relationship.
The thing about online messaging
is someone could say,
"Hey, I'm 16 years old,"
and it turns out they're actually 30
and have nefarious intent.
The concern with that was that
maybe it was something leading
towards a trafficking situation.
So, we contacted law enforcement
out there in California.
We had to find out what was going on.
We weren't sure who this person was.
We found the person
that she was talking to in California.
We were able to talk to him.
And it turned out
he hadn't left the state,
and he was actually 14 or 15.
Their communications were
age-appropriate flirting.
You know, he wasn't asking her
to come out to California
so that he could pimp her
or anything like that.
[Chamberlain] At this point, there are
still so many questions.
Most of the tips I've heard have been in
connection with Lashaya being trafficked.
From what I'm seeing on social media,
most people are not aware that the person
that Lashaya was meeting that night
was her ex-boyfriend.
They don't even know she was at the school
because the video of her there
hasn't even been released.
I realize in an active investigation,
it's important for law enforcement to keep
some information private,
but let's see what else
I can piece together.
So, this is an article
from 9News from 2020,
and it says, "Aurora Police
have completed a search at an Aurora house
possibly connected
to the case of a teenage girl
who went missing
more than four years ago."
It says they were taking
concrete out of the house,
which could indicate remains of some kind.
I wonder if she had a connection
to anyone who lived here.
[news reporter 7] A tip led officers here,
and officers say that
she knew the family that lived
in that home four years ago,
but it was not the focus
of the investigation until now.
So she did know the family.
I'm wondering why they took that concrete.
I think my biggest question is,
whose house was this?
[Jason] Can't rule anybody out
till we find her.
The ex-boyfriend was the last person
to have seen her.
Friends said they didn't have
the best relationship,
so he had to remain a person of interest.
They ex-boyfriend's parents
were also spoken to.
Turned out that the father did not approve
of his son dating African-American girls.
The ex-boyfriend's father was
African-American and his wife was white.
He wished his son to date white girls.
And so the fact that
his son was dating Lashaya at some point
raised eyebrows
with the police investigation.
[Faith] So, the ex-boyfriend
said that Lashaya had told him
she had this news she had to share,
but wouldn't tell him what it was.
And I thought, if there was
a world where maybe this news
that Lashaya had to give
was disruptive to that family,
then maybe there was a motive.
During the conversation
with the boyfriend,
investigators noticed he had
some scratches on his arm.
And he told the investigators
that when Lashaya wanted him to sit down,
she had grabbed his arm
and kind of pulled him down.
And he said that's what
those marks were from.
It's obviously a little suspicious.
So, we're thinking,
maybe this important news that Lashaya had
to tell her ex-boyfriend
was that she's pregnant.
[Faith] Sabrina thought
that Lashaya was menstruating,
but Lashaya and her boyfriend
had this weird relationship.
It was pretty age-appropriate,
but the boyfriend told Lashaya
he had cancer,
even though he didn't have cancer.
So, she could have been saying she was
pregnant, even if she wasn't pregnant.
That would have caused
great concern, obviously,
for the ex-boyfriend,
as well as his father,
who didn't approve of him dating
African-American girls in the first place.
And then around that time
Lashaya disappeared,
there was reports of blocks of concrete
being removed from the home by the dad.
The ex-boyfriend's father put 'em into a
dumpster that was outside the residence.
And they thought, well,
maybe he's busted up the basement floor
to bury her in dirt beneath the concrete.
We didn't have enough probable cause to
believe that a crime was committed
to support the search warrant.
We continued to monitor that house,
and several years later, in 2020,
the f-the family was
no longer living there.
And the owner of the house gave us consent
to do more of a search of that house
to see if there was any evidence
that Lashaya had been there.
[news reporter 8]
Aurora police were seen in 2020
searching a vacant house in connection
with her disappearance.
Cadaver dogs did an alert
at an area in the basement.
I thought maybe we finally
are gonna get some answers.
They break up concrete,
um, and then we look through it, right?
We can sift through it.
So, we dug up that concrete
where the dogs had alerted.
Lashaya was not under the concrete.
There was nothing but hardpack.
I don't know what the dogs found,
but I learned that cadaver dogs
can hit on graves from the Civil War.
[Poppe] It was a dead end.
But even though we didn't find anything
during the search of the basement,
it didn't rule out anyone.
[Chamberlain] With the evidence I've seen,
it's impossible to know for sure
what happened
the night Lashaya disappeared.
Did her meetup with her ex-boyfriend go as
he described it to the police?
Or did something else happen
in the schoolyard?
And are there other people involved?
He ended up at his house,
and her phone pinged near her house,
but was she with it?
Really, I just I wanna
ask him what happened.
[line ringing]
Hi, my name is Kara.
I am investigating
Lashaya Stine's disappearance.
Can I ask you a few questions
about Lashaya?
Lashaya's ex-boyfriend didn't want to be
recorded or answer my questions,
and I have mixed feelings about that.
I think most people who don't have
anything to hide would want to talk.
But when this happened,
both he and Lashaya were teenagers.
And having been a teenager
when I went through something traumatic,
I know that very often
you don't have the ability,
the coping mechanisms,
to deal with what happens.
When I looked at my friends and family
and my boyfriend at the time
and how they dealt with me being missing,
and my ex-boyfriend, for example,
did not ever publicly share
what he went through
until he did my documentary.
But, of course, the hope
is that Lashaya's ex-boyfriend
would have more information
about what happened to Lashaya.
I have so much to update you on,
and a lot of this is new information
that hasn't been released.
We do know that Lashaya was going to meet
her ex-boyfriend
the night she went missing.
-Wow.
-They were meeting up at a school,
which is actually right there
by the area where she was walking.
She needed to talk to him about something,
but he says that he just left
before he even got the opportunity
to hear this thing
that she wanted to tell him.
That's very strange. Um
Obviously, we had no idea
that she had planned to go and meet him,
so that answers a big question.
So, then I have to wonder,
"What is it that she was telling him?"
-Yeah.
-"Did
Was it something that
his dad wouldn't approve of?"
Could it have been, yeah,
something that, yeah, was gonna affect him
in a way that,
you know, he didn't want it to affect him.
Law enforcement and the FBI were searching
the ex-boyfriend's house.
Cadaver dogs alerted in the basement
to the presence
of some kind of human remains.
And so the FBI actually was removing the
concrete to go get it tested.
And it turned out that
it was not connected.
Yeah, and that's good to know, you know,
that they are following,
you know, the leads that they're getting.
My gut's telling me
there's just something more to the story.
They did find another video
of two individuals walking away
from the area of the school
at the same time that Lashaya was
allegedly leaving this area.
So, could it be connected?
Or could they have seen something?
That's just crazy.
Now is the time to come forward.
Every day, I hold out hope
that she's okay.
And I hold out hope that she's doing well.
I hold out hope that she will
come home to her family.
I hold out hope that
that my sister will have
her daughter back,
and that my nephews
will have their sister back,
and that their children
will get to meet their auntie.
[Sabrina] I just want to know,
if she is alive, where is she?
And if she's not alive,
I wanna know, "How?"
And is there a way that
we could recover her remains?
I want closure.
[Chamberlain] Lashaya's case
has been open for ten years,
and every single day,
her family has to deal
with not knowing what happened.
I want to get Lashaya's family the answers
and the peace that they deserve.
Somebody saw something that night.
Somebody knows where she is.
And I hope that sharing
her story and her face
jogs the memory of the person
that has that information.
If you have any new information
about Lashaya's case,
please call law enforcement directly.
Visit the Somebody Knows Something
channel on abcnews.com
for further discussion
about Lashaya's case.
[person] His car was found
in the Las Vegas area.
We had no idea why Steven was there.
[Chamberlain] Does he tell anyone what
he's doing on these road trips?
[person 2] It was definitely a secret.
[Harlowe] Steven was raised Mormon,
so he wouldn't gamble, he wouldn't drink.
[person 3] If there was
something that he was hiding,
anything could be on the table
as a possibility.