Police said that an amber alert was sent out after a Missouri City girl who was 11 years old went missing.
Imani Stephens was named as the person who died. She was last seen around 1:45 a.m. in the 3700 block of Dry Creek Drive. The police said that Stephens was wearing glasses, a black-and-gray shirt with red letters on black stripes, multicolored sweatpants, and crocks when he went missing. On both of her wrists, she has scars.
Officials say that Stephens ran away on July 9, but his family used Find My Phone to find him. They also say that when she ran away, she was found with an older man. The grandmother of the missing child thinks that her granddaughter ran away with a man she met on the internet. She said that Stephens had used bedsheets to get down from the second floor and could have left her phone and other things behind on purpose.
Earlier, the Texas Department of Public Safety had narrowed down the suspects to two men and put out a bulletin on social media to try to catch them. But both of them were soon found not to be guilty. Diaz is the same name for both suspects, who are 28 and 21 years old. According to Click2Houston, once one of the suspects found out he was linked to Stephens’ disappearance, he went to the police station to clear his name.
Stephens’ grandmother told him that her father died when she was only 5 months old and that she has never been able to get over it. After ruling out two men as suspects, the suspect is still out there and is seen as a threat by the authorities. Police said that she is thought to be in “grave or immediate danger.” The investigation is still going on, and the FBI and the Houston Police Department are helping. A neighborhood security guard who works the night shift told KHOU, “He walked to the corner of the house, and then all of a sudden, he and the little girl, who couldn’t have been more than 11 or 12 years old, walked back. He must have been in his 20s or 30s at least.”
Santos goes on to say that the girl didn’t have to get into the truck, so he says, “He gets in, she gets in. At that point, I kind of wanted to go over there and stop them because I thought it was kind of strange.” But he wasn’t dragging her or anything either. Stephen’s grandmother, Kimberly Wright, was very worried. In a video that was posted on Twitter, she talked about how worried she was.