In the Steps of a Predator, In a Time of Pandemic

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

Glendale, AZ — In the early morning hours of September 15, 2019, 14-year-old Alicia Navarro sat at the desk of her upstairs bedroom and penned a note to her mother. She was feeling a bit anxious — it was already 1 a.m. and her mother still had not gone to sleep. This could foil the entire plan.

“I ran away,” the young teen scribbled on a piece of paper. “I’ll be back, I swear.” It was just five days away from her 15th birthday. She left the note on her desk.

When the house was finally silent, Navarro grabbed her cell phone and silver MacBook, but no chargers, and crept downstairs. She slipped past her stepfather asleep on the couch, and out the back door of the family home. Wherever she was headed, she had no intention of staying long.

The petite teenager, who has long, dark hair, deep brown eyes and braces, and who family members say looks young for her age, then stacked two lawn chairs to scale the fence that encloses the family’s backyard, and used a pile of bricks to clear a second fence. Around 3 a.m., somewhere near the intersection of 45th Avenue and Rose Lane, Navarro disappeared into the night.

In some ways, Alicia Navarro is not a typical teenager. She has high-functioning autism and a level of social anxiety that makes it hard for her to spend long periods of time away from home, especially without her medication. She prefers to wear the same sweatshirt nearly every day, even in the sweltering Arizona heat, and favors the vast universe of online gaming to high school social clubs. Navarro is also dependent on the adults in her life for help navigating public transportation, and only a few select foods, like McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets or croissants from Starbucks, appeal to her highly attuned palate.

In other ways though, Navarro carries many of the hallmarks of a conventional high-schooler learning to navigate the world — she has a handful of friends she opens up to about her life, and even the boys she finds cute; she has a major online presence she keeps largely hidden from her parents; and, for all her youthful naïveté, she still has that secretive, semi-rebellious side so characteristic of the teenage years.

From the get-go, the Glendale Police Department approached the case with reticence. “Runaways usually turn up,” they’d explain, but the days kept ticking on with no sign of the teen. Navarro’s mother, Jessica Nunez, knew her daughter was not a runaway. This behavior was so uncharacteristic of Navarro that Nunez came to believe her daughter must have been lured away in the night by someone she’d really grown to trust. That individual had probably instructed her on how to escape, and what to bring along.

One of the first credible-sounding sightings came just four days after Navarro slipped away into the night. Multiple witnesses, including one kid that may have known Navarro personally, described seeing the girl being pulled along by the hand through La Pradera park around 4 p.m. by an “older, dark-skinned man” with a “heavily tattooed neck.”

La Pradera is a large park within the square grid formed by W Glendale Ave, N 39th Ave, N 41st Ave and W Ocotillo Rd. The area is often bustling with families, soccer games and even AA meetings, but residents of the area say after dark, it’s a different story. La Pradera is home to a large transient community making the area ripe for rampant drug use with little police oversight, according to those who live nearby.

Nunez raced to La Pradera park, which is about one-and-a-half miles from the family’s home and spoke to three corroborating witnesses, but without cameras in the park, the lead appeared to evaporate into a dead end.

By the time two weeks had passed with no sign of Navarro, and no pings from her phone or computer, the FBI had joined in the search. They looked into the teen’s online activity as Navarro was a prolific gamer who spent hours racking up chat logs across dozens of games on multiple consoles and devices. This task would be daunting, but predators have been known to lurk on every game, app and server accessible to children.

In their quest for insight into Alicia’s online life, the FBI questioned one of the teenager’s closest gamer friends, 20-year-old Clark Sampels, from Salem, Oregon. Like Navarro, Sampels is also an experienced gamer who even runs his own Discord server (a place where gamers can converse in real time). “I lent [the FBI] my Xbox and phone for roughly 18 hours and gave them all my passwords,” Sampels told me, when we chatted online. He added that he and Navarro shared a group of mutual gamer friends who were trying to build Navarro’s confidence toward making more “real-life” friends. “She was very introverted, timid and shy,” he said, adding it just wouldn’t be normal for Navarro to go meet up with someone she barely knew.

More than ten months have now passed since Navarro disappeared, and the prevailing theory is that she was groomed and lured away from home by an online predator. It’s common knowledge to law enforcement that sexual predators and traffickers will pose as friends or potential love interests on every imaginable social platform kids have access to. Unfortunately, all the usual barriers to such an investigation have been even further complicated by the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic, and subsequent civil unrest.

Four months after Navarro’s disappearance, Phoenix area law enforcement came out with the results of an operation they’d been carrying out, called “Operation Silent Predator,” which had yielded the arrest of 27 local men accused of attempting to lure police officers, posing as minors online, into meeting them to perform sex acts. Some of those men, including OTF gang member and lifelong criminal Devonte Junior Owens, 25, — who has the word “Killa” tattooed on his face — lived less than a half mile from Navarro. A search of the Arizona sex offender registry reveals there are more than 250 sex offenders registered in the Glendale area alone, with one offender, 39-year-old Antonio Daniel Holguin, living mere houses away from Navarro’s family.

Like Owens, Holguin has an extensive criminal record, including charges for public indecency, luring minors and firearm possession, stretching back to at least 2006. Also similar to Owens, Holguin has neck tattoos, just like the man described in the alleged La Pradera park sighting.

While law enforcement has discouraged putting up an official reward for information that may lead to finding Navarro, due to the abundance of tips they already receive, that hasn’t stopped individuals in the community from independently offering up small sums of their own money in an attempt to garner new leads and jumpstart the investigation. Community members have also independently rallied to organize search parties, and have even managed to get a billboard with Navarro’s information placed alongside a critical highway leading into California.

Law enforcement is notorious for keeping quiet about ongoing investigations, but a growing community of fed-up residents of Glendale, and beyond, is intent on sending a clear message to whoever took the much-loved teenager: We’re not giving up, and we’ll only be getting louder until Alicia comes home to us.

If you have any information about the disappearance of Alicia Navarro, you are urged to 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.