Tiffany Reid's family has been haunted by their disappearance for more than two decades.
The teenager disappeared on May 17, 2004, started a long time looking for her loved ones and changed the trajectory of older sister Deiangra Reid's life forever and pushed it into a legal profession to help other families of murdered and missing indigenous women.
Dateline's podcast: Missing in America is now taking a new look at Tiffany's case in the hope that new evidence could finally contribute to bringing their beloved people home.
What happened to Tiffany Reid?
Tiffany was only 16 when she disappeared this Monday morning on the way to school all the years ago.
Tiffany, who, like most teenage girls, loved to make her hair and develop her own style, asked her sister to go to Shiprock Northwest High School in New Mexico, but Deiginra – who had just come home from work – said no regret with life.
“I was just tired,” Deiginra recalled. “You know, I had completed a layer of cemetery, so I didn't have the energy to get up and go to school.”
That night Deiann's mother called her to tell her that Tiffany hadn't come home. Deiangra thought her sister could just be traveling with friends, but the next morning her panicked mother called her again.
Although Deiangra was initially not concerned, she felt “a little worried” when her mother called again the next morning to see if she heard of Tiffany. “Only the tone of my mother's voice and the panic she had was different. I felt that it was the intuition of a mother to tell her that something was wrong,” she said.
Who is Tiffany Reid?
The siblings grew on a farm in Shiprock, a small community in the Navajo reserve in San Juan County. According to Deiangra, who was four years older, her parents often fought.
“There was a lot of violence in our house when we were younger,” she said. “As a older sister, I always tried to protect my little sister from it, just so that she was not too much exposed.”
Her parents divorce when Tiffany was about 8 years old.
When Deiangra then moved out, Tiffany had to take on more responsibility in the house, especially after her mother was diagnosed with cancer. The once calm Tiffany just found her voice when she disappeared.
“She was really talented and … creative,” recalled Deingra. “She wrote a lot of poems. She wrote her songs. She sang in the past. She danced earlier.”
In the search for Tiffany, only a few clues are created
When Tiffany's mother called school officer, she learned that Tiffany never made it to class the day she had disappeared.
She also called the Shiprock district of the Navajo Nation's police department to try to submit a report on missing persons. According to Deiangra, the case was initially regarded as a potential outlier case, and the authorities asked their mother to wait 72 hours before submitting a report.
Deiangra does not believe that her sister had run away and pointed out that Tiffany had gone well at school and had a close group of friends.
“When she went, she went with her school bag as if she had really intended to go to school,” she said. “I didn't see her wearing an additional bag or something with her to show that she wouldn't come home.”
When the family waited for the 72 hours, they searched for Tiffany, spoke with their friends and put on flyers, but nobody had heard of the missing teenager.
After the 72 hours had expired and Tiffany's mother officially reported to her, Deiängra said that it took another four days for Tiffany to enter the National Crime Information Center (NCIC), a national database for law enforcement officers.
“And so that's a whole week in which she didn't even lead in the system,” she told Josh Mankiewicz. “That is lost a lot of time.”
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Tiffany's wallet is discovered on the highway
Then, just a few days after the disappearance of Tiffany, a driver noticed something along a lonely section of the motorway, on which Route 64 crossed with the Highway 160 near the reservation community of Sweetwater, Arizona, about an hour west of Shiprock. It was Tiffany's wallet and her library card as well as some clothing that the teenager may have belonged or not.
Nobody is sure how the objects land there. Deiangra said Tiffany had no known connection to the area. Although some in the area described it as a party spot for children, Tiffany does not believe that her sister went there to celebrate.
“I think the part you call yourself a party spot is the mountain up and her things were not found on the mountain,” she said. “It was found next to the highway.”
At that time, Tiffany had not tracked a cell phone or debit card investigator. With no other indications, the case soon became cold.
In 2018, the family got a little wrong hope after a policeman stopped a car full of people outside of Shiprock and one of the passengers gave the name “Tiffany Reid”. However, the woman was not Tiffany, and nobody is sure why she would have given this name.
After the incident, Tiffany's family learned that her name had accidentally been “cleaned” from the NCIC system when the center switched to a new database, which means that the police did not know that Tiffany was a missing person. Your information was later added to the system, but the family still wonders whether the dilapidated time might have hindered its case.
“All the cracks they could imagine so that their case falls, their case fell through this cracks,” said Deiangra.
The police refused to comment on the case, citing active examination.
Become a lawyer for others
In the years that have been disappeared since Tiffany's disappearance, her mother died tragically from cancer. Deiangra fought to get ready with the tragedies, but she finally went back to school to study criminal justice and found her way to the attorney.
Today Deingra is a member of the New Mexico Department of Justice MMIP Task Force, which was created to raise awareness of missing and murdered indigenous people. She also works for the coalition to stop violence against local women (CSVAND). “We support the 23 tribes of New Mexico with political interests, training and education,” Tiffany Jiron, Executive Director of the coalition, told Mankiewicz.
Deiangra also hopes to take the Navajo nation to continue the lawsuit in order to continue her work in criminal judiciary and find justice for her sister.
“I want to know what's going on with my sister's case,” she said. “So I work myself to actually be part of the system.”
At the time of her disappearance, Tiffany was 5'3 ”and 115 pounds. She had dark black hair, brown eyes, a scar under her right eye and a scar on one of her arms. Today she would be 37 years old.
Anyone who has information about their case is asked to call the Shiprock District from Navajo Nation under 505-368-1350.
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