Listen to Gone From Glendale, our investigative podcast covering Alicia Navarro’s disappearance.

This story is part of an ongoing series about missing Arizona teenager, Alicia Navarro. Read previous coverage of the case here.

*Two minors referenced in this story have been given pseudonyms to protect their identities.

*Alicia Navarro poses with her dog, Sushi, in an undated photo provided by her family. Her mother, Jessica, describes Alicia as a profound lover of animals.*

By Alissa Fleck

Glendale, AZ — In the second-floor bedroom of a ranch-style home in the sprawling Cactus District of Glendale, Arizona, Jessica Grijalva Nunez pulls one of her teenage daughter’s crumpled t-shirts from a dirty laundry hamper. She lifts it up to her face, closes her eyes, and breathes it in, slow and deep. The shirt is black, sleeveless and emblazoned with the cover art from Pink Floyd’s 1973 album, “The Dark Side of the Moon.”

“Alicia loves this band,” she says with a smile. After a pause, she adds, almost apologetically, “I can’t wash this, it still smells like her.”

Today marks almost 11 months since Jessica’s daughter Alicia went missing from her home in the middle of the night. As the one-year milestone of Alicia’s disappearance draws closer, Jessica has been told by local law enforcement that her daughter’s case has been “de-prioritized.” This is the same police department that urged Jessica not to put up a reward because of the abundance of tips they had already received, and that also once told Jessica: “Maybe Alicia doesn’t want to be found.”

Together, Jessica and I pore over nearly every inch of her daughter’s bedroom. On Alicia’s favorite blanket, a fading blonde princess sits atop a purple-tinged pony. On collages Alicia made to describe herself for school, she’d cut and pasted words like “nerdy” and “introvert.” We even leaf through binders of Alicia’s old math quizzes, as Jessica explains that despite her daughter’s personal challenges, she’s always excelled academically.

Still, fitting in at school, and in this world in general, has always been a struggle for Alicia, who has high-functioning autism, and copes with acute anxiety and other health problems. She changed schools several times before most recently ending up at Bourgade Catholic High School, where she seemed to be doing better, according to her mom, and had even made a few close friends.

*Jessica holds up a shirt Alicia had worn shortly before she went missing. She says she can’t bring herself to wash the clothes that still smell like her daughter.*

*Jessica shows me Alicia’s favorite blanket.*

But, well before we even make our way up to Alicia’s bedroom, Jessica and I sit across from one another at the family’s kitchen table, as she lays out the same painful story she’s been over so many times before.

It’s not my first or even second time hearing Alicia’s story, but we go through this ritual because we’ve both come to understand one fundamental truth: The only way to bring Alicia home is by keeping her story alive.

I’ll be back, I swear.

Around 3 a.m. on Sunday, September 15, 2019, 14-year-old Alicia Navarro sat at her bedroom desk and penned a brief note for her mother to find the next day.

“I ran away,” she wrote. “I’ll be back, I swear. I’m sorry.” Then, Alicia, who is 4’9” and weighs just 89 pounds, crept downstairs, pulled on her favorite pair of Vans sneakers, tiptoed past her stepfather who was asleep on the couch with the TV still humming, and walked out the back door of the home on W Rose Lane, leaving the door open behind her. Alicia stacked chairs and bricks to scale two fences on the west side of her house, presumably in order to evade the neighbors’ cameras to the east, and then the 14-year-old girl, who was just five days shy of her 15th birthday, vanished into the warm Arizona night.

Aside from a flurry of sightings over the past 10 months — some credible, some not — Alicia has not been seen since, and Jessica has become an unwitting inductee into the loneliest club no parent wants to imagine exists, let alone be a part of — Jessica is now the mother of a missing child whose case is on the verge of going cold.

“I don’t talk about it to my friends anymore,” Jessica says, “because I feel like a broken record.”

No one wants to imagine their child could go missing, but it happens every day. In fact, according to recent statistics, it happens to 2,000 kids a day in the United States alone. The “good” news, if such a word can even be uttered in this context, is, the vast majority of missing kids make it back home alive.

For many parents whose children disappear, a nagging sense of suspicion can take root deep inside that makes them question who they can trust, if anyone. This can cause distraught parents to further isolate themselves from society. In Jessica’s case, the all-consuming stress and helplessness over Alicia’s disappearance has been further compounded by the coronavirus pandemic, which has forced the family and school officials to cancel vigils, and impeded the investigation on multiple fronts, including by affecting the ability of investigators to properly question witnesses.

Adding to the perpetual worry about her daughter’s whereabouts and wellbeing over the last year, Jessica has had to face other harsh realities that plague the parents of missing children. She’s been scammed by supposed psychics. She’s seen her daughter’s missing person flyers torn down all over town. She’s had businesses refuse to put them up in the first place. She’s had witnesses dangle potential leads in front of her only to fall off the grid, maybe out of fear for their own safety.

The word “nightmare” doesn’t begin to describe what Jessica is going through.

“I had to fight just to get a Silver Alert,” she tells me. A Silver Alert is a type of public notification system that aims to broadcast information about vulnerable missing persons throughout the United States.

I ask Jessica if police canvassed the neighborhood immediately after Alicia’s disappearance, and she tells me she had to take it upon herself to knock on neighbors’ doors and track down surveillance footage. She says she’s sure someone on the block was awake when her daughter left, and must have seen something.

I reached out to Detective Mario Sanchez of the Glendale Police Department who has been personally handling Alicia’s case from the beginning. He said he does not do interviews and directed me to Glendale PD’s Public Information Officer, Sgt. Randy Stewart, who has not yet returned my request for comment. (I will update this story if and when he does.)

Alicia’s case was elevated to the FBI as early as two weeks after she went missing, according to someone familiar with the investigation, but it’s unclear whether a federal investigation remains active.

The Many Layers to Alicia Navarro

A prevailing theory in the media is that Alicia, an internet-savvy gamer with a rich online social presence across many platforms, was groomed over time by an internet predator, or possibly a ring of them, who managed to gain her trust and then whisk her away in the night. There’s evidence to support this theory, and Jessica did once catch Alicia giving her personal details to a stranger online, after which she promptly sat her daughter down for a serious talk about the many dangers lurking on the internet.

Another time, Jessica filed an incident report with the police after she caught Alicia texting with someone who seemed considerably older, at least based on the mature content of the conversation.

While the faceless internet predator narrative is a convenient one to cling to, it’s not the only possible explanation for Alicia’s disappearance. As one investigator told Jessica, “Alicia had two lives,” and her trusting nature makes her an especially vulnerable target for the kinds of predators who prey on the rebellious nature of teenagers — both online and in “real” life.

In the months leading up to Alicia’s disappearance, the 14-year-old self-described introvert was undergoing noticeable changes in nearly every area of her life, says Jessica. While adolescence is commonly marked by periods of self-exploration, personal growth and general boundary-pushing, Alicia is not like most other adolescents — she thrives on a certain measure of routine and predictability.

Alicia is highly intelligent, but she’s also shy, has a limited palate when it comes to food and is prone to sensory overload, especially in public places. Sometimes Alicia would be so distressed about the prospect of leaving home she’d curl up into a ball on the floor and scream, Jessica recalls. Other times she might self-harm in an effort to soothe her overwhelming anxiety.

It’s that particular Alicia, curled up in the fetal position, screaming, “NO! NO! NO!” that Jessica can’t stop picturing these days. She tells me she still feels guilty that all she could get Alicia to eat the day she went missing was french fries. Was she hungry that night, she wonders. Is she hungry right now?

Despite the challenges she faced, before she went missing, Alicia seemed to be pushing herself hard to overcome some of her personal boundaries. Jessica says her daughter finally seemed happier after years of struggling with her mental health.

The last time Jessica saw her daughter, Alicia was standing on the staircase around 1 a.m., just two hours before she went missing. “She was smiling, chatty, she just looked so happy standing there,” says Jessica. The fretful mother allowed herself a moment of relief — how could she possibly know her whole world would be upended in just a matter of hours?

With the benefit of hindsight, Jessica says some of Alicia’s innocuous-seeming actions prior to her disappearance — including the drastic changes in her character and interests — have since taken on more sinister undertones.

Five months before she went missing, Alicia began expressing interest in Marvel’s “Demon in a Bottle” Iron Man series, and in particular one comic book which cost nearly two-hundred dollars. Jessica bought the book for Alicia, but says she never once saw her reading it. Jessica didn’t think much of it until she later realized Alicia brought the comic book along with her the night she went missing, which led Jessica to think maybe it was meant to be a gift for whoever Alicia was planning to meet that night.

Leading up to her disappearance, Alicia also started wearing a fragrant body spray, which would have been previously unthinkable due to her aversion to overpowering smells. She also asked her mother to buy her concealer, so Jessica took her daughter to the MAC store. Alicia, who had been known to regularly wear the same baggy sweatshirt, even in the oppressive Arizona heat, then asked her mother to buy her an open-backed shirt that Jessica found to be uncharacteristically provocative for the usually timid and reserved 14-year-old. Nonetheless, Jessica complied.

Alicia’s taste in music also recently began to shift, explains Jessica. She went from listening to mostly pop music, to liking older stuff, like Pink Floyd. And as far as her limited palate was concerned, she’d requested a fancy steak dinner and red velvet cake for her upcoming birthday.

“That — all of that, is new,” says Jessica.

Two weeks before she disappeared, Alicia asked to go to Metrocenter mall in Phoenix with some male friends from school, Jack* and Cody* (not their real names), which was also out of character, according to Jessica, as Alicia preferred to spend her time alone in her room immersed in the virtual world. Jack was a junior at Bourgade, who had been trying to get Alicia to join the school’s robotics club because of her proficiency with coding, and would later tell investigators that he saw Alicia with a burner phone in a backpack that day at the mall, but Jessica insists Alicia had nothing with her when she dropped her off at the mall for the two-hour outing.

After the mall excursion, Alicia gushed to her mom about a boy she and her friends had met up with that day, a friend of Cody’s, who was “quite fit.” Alicia developed a subsequent interest in fitness and protein supplements, a passion Jessica again patiently indulged, hoping to encourage what seemed like progress in her daughter.

There was something else that appeared around that time though, a detail just small enough to miss, if it weren’t for the pure strangeness of it. Jessica one day noticed a hole about the size of a golfball in Alicia’s window screen. It was odd to be sure, but not exactly ominous at the time.

“She told me a bird did it,” Jessica says, “but my husband pointed out it was clearly made from the inside.” Could Alicia have been using the hole in the screen to pass notes to someone outside, Jessica later wondered. And, if she was passing notes to a would-be abductor, could the same person have then been familiar enough with the area to instruct Alicia on exactly how to escape undetected, and how to stage a “runaway scene” that would keep investigators at bay as long as possible?

*Jessica shows the approximate size of the hole that one day appeared in Alicia’s window screen on the west side of the family home.*

On September 4, just 11 days before she went missing, Alicia messaged friend and confidant, 20-year-old Clark Sampels, who lives in Oregon, on Discord, an app popular among gamers, but which has also received its fair share of notoriety for being a hunting ground for sexual predators.

Alicia messaged Clark to tell him she’d sold her much-loved Xbox, and that she “has a boyfriend now.” She also mentioned learning to play electric guitar and joining a band with Cody. Multiple witness accounts have suggested Alicia may have been involved in two overlapping relationships, both of which ended in difficult breakups.

Clark told me sometimes Alicia would talk about people or situations that didn’t really exist, and it was often hard to parse the truth from fiction during their online interactions, which is perhaps what led some of her friends to ignore clear warning signs. For instance, Alicia told Jack about her plan to run away, possibly to California, the Thursday before she disappeared, and even allegedly invited him along.

The Night Everything Changed

Alicia chose to leave through the backdoor and scale two fences on the west side of the house, when it would have been more convenient to go in the opposite direction, but the easier route would also would have exposed her to the neighbors’ surveillance cameras. One detail that’s stuck out to Jessica is that the second fence Alicia scaled was unlocked — she could have just pushed it open. “She probably didn’t want to make any noise though,” Jessica says.

It’s confirmed that Alicia left her house alone because it had rained just beforehand and there was only one pair of footprints in the mud leading away from the house — the footprints from Alicia’s Vans.

It’s significant what Alicia brought with her when she left home, but equally meaningful is what she left behind. Alicia brought with her a small black backpack adorned with metallic cat ears, in which she packed her new body spray and makeup, the “Demon in a Bottle” comic book, her silver MacBook and her cell phone, but no chargers. Clearly, she did not intend to be gone long.

*Jessica points to the backyard route Alicia used to escape the night of her disappearance.*

The Search Continues

One of the earliest credible-sounding sightings of Alicia came on September 20 from a kid who knew Alicia personally and mentioned to Jessica seeing her the day prior, on September 19, at La Pradera, a park approximately 1.5 miles from Alicia’s house. Jessica raced to the park, where multiple witnesses corroborated seeing a girl who looked like Alicia walking with an “African-American man with tattoos on his hands, neck and face.”

I visited La Pradera myself. It’s a large park with various nooks and crannies that appears to draw all types, including picnicking families, drug-addled transients, day laborers and religious zealots.

Last month, I cross-referenced the La Pradera sighting and neighborhood directories with the results of a recent undercover sting operation called “Operation Silent Predator,” in which Phoenix area detectives arrested 27 men who were attempting to lure minors from the internet into meeting up for sex acts — or worse — and I found at least one man who appears to fit the profile.

The surveillance footage Jessica has managed to get from neighbors so far shows a white truck entering and leaving the neighborhood around the time Alicia disappeared.

Jessica tells me all of Alicia’s parental figures — including both her stepfather and her biological father, who lives in either Cuba or Florida and is not in the picture — have been cleared by law enforcement.

Jessica and other volunteers rallied to get a billboard for Alicia up on a crucial interstate leading to California, and they continue to follow up on other leads. Potential sightings come in all the time, Jessica explains, but they often come too late. She hopes anyone who has pertinent information or believes they see Alicia will contact the police immediately.

“She swore she’d be back,” Jessica says as we’re about to part ways, and in this moment, I know she’s not talking to me. She’s pleading with a cruel and seemingly arbitrary universe. “Wherever she is,” Jessica adds, “I just hope she’s happy.”

*Jessica holds two of Alicia’s favorite stuffed animals — the teenager is particularly fond of penguins.*

If you have any information about the disappearance of Alicia Navarro, you are urged to immediately call the Glendale Police Department at 623-930-3000. You may also contact the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children at 1-800-THE-LOST.