When 14-year-old Neveah Alessandro Campos ran away from her uncle’s home in Glendale Saturday afternoon, her mother Ashley Alessandro gave her a day to come back. But when she didn’t, Ashley did what any parent would do: she called the police, filed a missing person report and waited for help.
Nearly a week has passed, she said, with no updates from law enforcement and no statewide alert — leaving Ashley to wonder why her daughter’s disappearance on Nov. 1 isn’t being treated with urgency, especially given Neveah’s high-risk status and hospital-issued safety plan.
Update: Neveah’s mom, Ashley, said officials with Navajo Nation social services connected her with a woman who knew where her 14-year-old daughter was. On Nov. 8, Neveah’s aunt picked her up in the Phoenix metro area, where she’s been reunited safely with her family.
Neveah joins more than 300 children reported missing in Arizona since July whose cases haven’t triggered a Turquoise Alert – a statewide alert lawmakers said would close gaps in the system by searching — before it’s too late — for more children like Neveah currently missing. And for more children like Emily Pike, who went missing earlier this year and whose case ended in the worst tragedy any parent can experience.
Law enforcement officials said neither child qualified for Amber or Turquoise alerts, spurring questions about why.
More Indigenous families are sharing frustrations amid broader questions about the effectiveness of Arizona’s new Turquoise Alert system. An Arizona Luminaria analysis in October found that the alert had been used only once since launching in July, even as nearly 300 people were reported missing statewide during that same time. Since that reporting, the Arizona Department of Public Safety, which manages the state’s alert systems, has issued two more Turquoise Alerts within a four-day span and both children have since been found safe.
A growing number of criminal justice experts argue any missing child under 18 should immediately be considered endangered and spur statewide law enforcement alerts for the wider public’s help.
For Ashley, gaps in Arizona’s system remain painfully clear as she’s left to search on her own for her teenage daughter she describes as vulnerable and in danger.
“I love her, we love her,” Ashley told Arizona Luminaria over the phone. “She’s not in trouble and we just want her to come home.”
Neveah and Emily share similarities. The girls were both 14 when they ran away. Their families both did what they could on their own to search for their child. Their loved ones both pleaded for more help from law enforcement officials. And both girls are members of Arizona Tribal Nations and of families forced to endure the disparate number of Indigenous people who go missing and are murdered every year in the U.S.
Indigenous leaders and desperate loved ones have long called for reforms that truly address the systemic injustice in local and state law enforcement policies that have historically contributed to long delays in finding Indigenous children and adults and solving cases.
Emily’s family called for justice reforms, questioning why the San Carlos Apache teen had been missing for weeks with no statewide alert to search for her before she was found brutally murdered in February on Valentine’s Day. Their voices and efforts brought renewed local and national attention to creating an alert specifically aimed at finding Indigenous people and safely bringing them home.
Earlier this year, Arizona lawmakers proposed the Turquoise Alert as a new system to search for Indigenous people. They used Emily’s death as a reason for passing the legislation.
When Gov. Katie Hobbs signed the law in July, state leaders on both sides of the political aisle touted the alert as a solution that could have saved Emily’s life had law enforcement joined forces earlier with the public to create awareness and formally search for the runaway child — even as the Arizona Department of Public Safety confirmed at the same signing that Emily was not considered endangered. That meant no alert ever sounded for Emily, as no alert has sounded for Neveah.
Still, lawmakers coined the new criminal justice measure “Emily’s Law.” Emily’s uncle pushed back, calling the law too little too late.
Ashley is also pushing back for her daughter’s sake and calling on law enforcement to do more to bring her daughter home safely.
‘That does make her vulnerable’
Neveah is a ninth grader who loves art and has what her mom calls “a beautiful heart.” She’s the middle child, with an older brother and younger sister, and was raised in metro-Phoenix before her family’s recent move to Window Rock on the Navajo Nation.
“She did spend a lot of time on the rez … we’d visit during the summer,” Ashley said. “So I was thinking that transition would be alright for her, but she didn’t take it well.”
Neveah has been struggling with clinical depression and the family’s early September move seemed to intensify her feelings, Ashley said. She was recently placed on a hospital-issued safety plan and scheduled to enter an inpatient program in January, once spots became available.
Hoping it’d help, Ashley decided to pick up a temporary nursing shift in the Valley over the weekend while Neveah visited with family and friends. While Ashley was at work, Neveah ran away from her uncle’s home in Glendale.
Despite Neveah’s documented mental health struggles and high-risk status, Ashley said the Glendale Police Department declined to track her phone she took with her and a Turquoise Alert wasn’t issued for her disappearance.
The police department did not request an alert for Neveah because they believe her case didn’t meet the criteria for one, according to agency spokesperson Officer Moroni Mendez. When asked how a minor experiencing a mental health crisis wasn’t considered in danger, Mendez referred Arizona Luminaria to the department’s policies of over 1,000 pages and alert guidelines from the Arizona Department of Public Safety.
Mendez further explained the agency can’t ping someone’s phone without a warrant or emergency circumstances, regardless of the person being a missing minor and their parent requesting one.
Mendez said a detective had reached out to Ashley since Neveah was reported missing. Ashley disputed that claim, saying she was not contacted until Nov. 6 after Arizona Luminaria reached out to the agency about Neveah’s case.
DPS officials have not responded to Arizona Luminaria’s questions about how their agency, which ultimately determines whether to issue a statewide emergency alert when a local law enforcement office requests one, typically responds to missing minors with mental health concerns.
After she was reported missing, an officer briefly reached Neveah by phone and arranged to meet at a park but, when she didn’t show, dismissed her as “just playing games” and “being immature,” Ashley said.
“He was like, there’s nothing I can do at this point but put her on the missing person list and that was it,” she said.
To Ashley, the response from law enforcement is failing.
“I have her on a safety plan with the hospital where I’m not even supposed to have her around sharp objects or bottles of medication,” she said. “If the hospital is that concerned, like her therapists and stuff are that concerned, then that does make her vulnerable.”
‘The more exposure, the better’
Nationally, criminal justice experts are questioning dangerous errors in how law enforcement agencies respond from the onset and classify whether missing children are endangered.
”Sadly, many of those we “thought” were runaways or were voluntarily missing were actually abducted, lured away or were not allowed to return by a predator,” according to a statement from the AMBER Alert Training and Technical Assistance Program, which advocates for systemic changes in how law enforcement, media, transportation and other stakeholders partner to safely recover more missing children.
“Regardless of how they went missing, the bottom line is that their cases did not receive the same degree of attention or investigative resources that a reported abduction or endangered missing classification might have prompted,” reads the statement, which included input from roundtables and listening sessions with surviving family members of missing, abducted and murdered children who shared what they learned after their child went missing.
Ashley wants local and state law enforcement to do more now to find her child. Her daughter’s age alone puts her at risk of sexual violence, drug exposure and exploitation, she said.
“She’s around people who don’t care,” she said. “I feel like it could have been solved so easily while I was still there … they could have just tracked her location, we would have went and got her and it would have been the end of that.”
Ashley’s frustrations come amid broader questions about the effectiveness of Arizona’s new Turquoise Alert system.
Officials with DPS told Arizona Luminaria the system was working as it was designed to and that triggering alerts for every runaway child would desensitize the public.
“Many runaway cases, while important and investigated, do not present articulable danger or suspicious circumstances beyond leaving voluntarily, and therefore do not qualify for Turquoise Alert activation,” the agency wrote in its statement.
Officials added that DPS does not initiate alerts on its own. Instead, a local investigating agency must submit a formal request for one, which DPS then reviews to determine whether it meets the standards to issue a statewide alert that raises public and news media awareness in hopes of finding a missing child or adult.
Even Emily Pike, the law’s namesake, wouldn’t have qualified for a Turquoise Alert due to her being labeled a runaway and law enforcement not considering her endangered at the time she disappeared. Advocates — including Emily’s own Tribal Nation and family since she was found murdered — say the runaway label shouldn’t be used for any missing child because it takes away the urgency from cases.
“I hear two words, runaway and missing. Two little words that make a big difference on whether an investigation is done or whether they just sweep it under the rug,” Emily’s uncle, Allred Pike Jr., said in May at the legislative ceremonial signing. “Something that’s named after her wouldn’t have made a difference if she was still here, that’s something that we need to take a look at.”
Arizona is home to 22 federally recognized Tribal Nations, and was identified in a 2018 study as having the third-highest number of Indigenous women and girls going missing or being murdered in the country.
In 2020, a legislative study found that 160 Indigenous women and girls were murdered in Arizona between 1976 and 2018 — a total that steadily increased in those 40 years. Additionally, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System showed just over 90 Native Americans were reported missing in Arizona since 1956, according to the database as of Nov. 6.
Arizona Luminaria recently launched an MMIP database, where just under 100 women and girls who are missing or were murdered are reflected so far. That data has shown that women ages 19 to 46 accounted for about 70% of all the cases.
Indigenous children in particular go missing “at a disproportionate rate to their representation in the overall U.S. population of children,” according to a 2023 congressional report. Since the Turquoise Alert was implemented on July 10, more than 300 children have been reported missing in Arizona, 9% of whom were identified as being “Indian,” according to a missing children database on DPS’ website.
Neveah, who is Navajo and Latino, is among those children.
As a single mother, Ashley felt she had no choice but to return to her new job on the Navajo Nation on Monday and throughout the week. She said she plans to head back to the Valley on Friday to continue searching for Neveah in person.
Ashley doesn’t know what Neveah was wearing at the time, but says it’s not uncommon for her to wear a black hoodie with shorts or flannel pajama pants. A flyer created by the family describes Neveah as just over 5 feet tall with straight black/brown shoulder-length hair and a dermal piercing under her right eye.
Neveah was last seen at about 3 p.m. on Nov. 1 near 69th Avenue and Bethany Home Road in Glendale. Ashley says she recently received a tip that Neveah could be in Surprise, though she wasn’t sure how accurate that information was.
The family is asking the public to share flyers and help raise awareness.
“The more exposure, the better,” Ashley said. “Hopefully somebody sees it and realizes this is serious.”
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