SAPULPA, Ok — Adrianna Garcia disappeared Dec. 29, 2004 while walking to a friend’s house.
She was only 15 at the time.
“Adrianna was at home with my mom. They had just moved into a new house and so they were painting and trying to get things ready to move in, and Adrianna was wanting to go to a friend’s house so instead of waiting which is what my mother told her to do and she would give her a ride there, she called her boyfriend and he was unable to leave work to take her and so Adrianna decided to walk,” said her sister, Anna Hamm.
That would be the last time Adrianna’s family ever heard from her.
Hamm admits she could be headstrong at times and Adrianna wasn’t the type of person who would wait if she wanted something right away.
“She had done this on a couple of occasions where she would go to somebody’s house and we didn’t know where but she would always came home. At the minimum, she would call and say hey, I’m going to be here for a day or two. When she didn’t come back, we knew something was wrong. She always came back. It wasn’t her thing to not communicate,” said Hamm.
2 News sat down with investigator, James Ables with the Creek County Sheriff’s Office to discuss Adrianna’s case.
He said investigators didn’t have the luxury of technology back in 2004 that they do now.
“The cellphones can sometimes give us a GPS location and sometimes we can ping the phones, and we didn’t have that back then and so if you talk to the older investigators it was the true detective type work, and it hadn’t really peaked in the digital evidence world so to speak, so they had to go knock on doors and try to figure out where she was,” said Ables.
Anna said Adrianna’s disappearance broke their mother’s heart, but her family had to keep going.
“She was a mom of 7 kids and she worked hard. She continued to work and continued to search for Adrianna and it was pretty tough on her I’m sure, but she managed. She still had children to feed and put through school and so that’s what she did,” said Hamm.
I asked her if investigators ever looked at her boyfriend as a possible person of interest.
“In my mind, he is suspect number 1. He had illegal documents. He was Mexican. He had been working for a restaurant in Sapulpa, which is why he said he couldn’t give her a ride at the time,” she said.
Investigators tell me her boyfriend has been hard to track down for that very reason and difficult to identify due to false names.
Ables said they even considered that a motive in this case could be human trafficking.
“We’ve thought about that and trying to reach out if that’s a possibility. Not just in the United States but since the boyfriend was from Mexico - seeing if they can assist us in anyway in Mexico,” said Ables.
Hamm said her sister’s disappearance changed her forever.
“I’m definitely a helicopter parent. My kids don’t go anywhere without me knowing exactly where and who. They don’t get the sleepovers and things like that and they don’t even go in the yard without me. If I can’t see them, they’re not going,” said Hamm.
If you have any information regarding the disappearance of Adrianna Garcia, you are asked to contact the Creek County Sheriff’s Office.
