Dateline Missing in America – Ep. 23: Through the Cracks

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Getting a 16-year-old off to school on time is no easy job.

Tiffany was the type that really took care of herself.

For a girl like Tiffany Reed, appearances mattered.

From hair to makeup to picking the right outfit.

She did her hair different every day.

She was really into her style.

Monday, May 17th, 2004 was no different for Tiffany.

She asked you to take her to school that last day.

Yeah, she did.

She was running late.

That is Deandra Reed, Tiffany's older sister.

I had gone off working a graveyard shift, so I didn't have the energy to get up and drive her to school.

That morning, Tiffany set out on foot for Shiprock Northwest High School in New Mexico.

Was it common for her to walk to school?

Yeah, it wasn't far.

The school year was almost over.

Summer nearly in Tiffany's reach.

Except that day, Tiffany did not come home after school.

There are times that she

would not come straight home from school, but she would still call my mom to let her know.

That call never came, and Tiffany never made it home.

That was 21 years ago.

I just want to know where she is.

I'm Josh Mankowitz, and this is Missing in America, a podcast from Dateline.

This episode is Through the Cracks.

Please listen closely because you or someone you know might hold the key to finding Tiffany and bringing her home.

Shiprock is a small community located on the Navajo Reservation in San Juan County.

So Shiprock is a really small town.

You know,

it's a little more developed than it was back then when we were growing up there, but it was a small town.

Tiffany and I grew up on a farm.

We grew up, you know, exploring the outdoors and picking on frogs and prairie dogs and running through the fields.

Deandra is the big sister by four years.

A lot of sisters who were four years apart, you know, fight like cats and dogs.

It doesn't feel like that happened here.

No, I think I took on more of the protective role because of the kind of environment we were growing up in.

So I think, if anything, we clung together more than we fought.

Deandra says she took on the role of protector because of their parents' rocky marriage.

There was a lot of violence in our home when we were younger.

You know, being the older sister, I always tried to shield my little sister from that

just so she didn't wasn't too exposed to it.

Deandra and Tiffany's parents divorced when Tiffany was about eight years old.

And we were just kind of, you know, caught up in the middle of it.

Deandra saw it affect her younger sister.

When Tiffany was a child, you know, she was really quiet.

And so when she was growing up, I did a lot of the talking for her.

Eventually, Deandra moved moved out and Tiffany had to step up.

Our mom was battling cancer, so I think she took on a lot of responsibility when I left.

And my mom was going through chemo, and it, you know, chemo can be really aggressive sometimes.

So I think it was hard for her to see our mom going through that.

As Tiffany became a teenager, She started to find her voice.

She was really talented and creative.

She wrote a lot of poetry.

She wrote her songs.

She used to sing.

She used to like dancing.

You know, she was just a teen girl going to school, finding her way, her individuality.

Tiffany Reed's story was still being written until that day in May 2004 when all the pages suddenly went blank.

She wanted me to take her to school that morning.

I was just tired, you know.

I had gotten off working a graveyard shift, so I didn't have the energy to get up and drive her to school.

You've been beating yourself up about that since then?

Yes, I have.

And

it's something that I'm trying to work through right now, you know, to

to learn to have compassion for myself and

let go of that guilt.

um

but it is something

because this is not your fault

yes um

and it's still hard it's still hard to to say that out loud it's also a hard moment to have to remember late in the day on may 17th 2004 Deandra got a call from her mother She's like, your sister didn't come home.

I haven't heard from her.

And I just told her, you know, maybe she's hanging out with her friend.

She'll be back, you know, just trying to keep that positivity.

When Tiffany did not make it back that night, her mom became anxious.

By the next morning, that anxiety reached a whole new level.

She called Deandra again.

She asked if I heard from her.

Tiffany and I, you know, we were still pretty much in contact every day up until the point she went missing.

Those were the days of the pagers, and she would page me all the time wanting to talk and stuff.

but I hadn't heard from her.

I got a little worried.

Just the tone of my mom's voice and

the panic that she had.

It was different.

I feel like maybe it was a mother's intuition telling her that something was wrong.

So her mother, Deidre, picked up the phone again.

She called the school to see if Tiffany had made it to school that day.

They said she had not alarm bells went off deidre also contacted the shiprock district of the navajo nation police department and tried to file a missing persons report they came out talked to her asked her if my sister had taken off from home before and my mom said yeah she has

and they just

basically ran with that and said, okay, well, maybe she just ran away from home.

So if she's not back in 72 hours, then you can report her missing.

Deandra says Tiffany had never actually run away before.

If she did leave the house, it would be to go hang out with friends.

She had snuck out a couple of times, but it was on the weekend when she did that.

It was a little unusual that it was a school night and she hadn't come home.

And what's more, Deandra says when she last saw Tiffany, it did not look as if she would be gone for long.

When she left, she left with her school bag like she really intended on going to school.

I didn't see her carrying an additional bag or anything with her to indicate that she wasn't going to be coming home.

When she disappeared, Tiffany was doing well in school and had a tight friend group.

So the question became, was there something else going on in her life?

Around the time she disappeared, did Tiffany ever report having trouble with anyone?

Was there anyone she was afraid of?

Anyone she was worried about?

And she never mentioned any concern or mentioned that she was scared.

While they waited out the 72 hours, Tiffany's family combed their town of Shiprock for any sign of her.

We still

went out and drove around looking for her, knocking on doors and stuff.

Like we weren't going to sit back and wait for the police to take the report.

They distributed flyers and spoke with Tiffany's friends.

They could not find anyone who had seen her.

You must have thought about that delay a lot in the last 20 years.

I have.

And even after the 72 hours went by and my mom reported her missing, they still waited another four days before they entered her into NCIC.

NCIC is the National Crime Information Center.

It's a database used by law enforcement agencies nationwide and is frequently used to help find missing persons.

And so that's a whole week of not even having her in the system.

That's a lot of time lost.

It is time that could have been vital in the search for Tiffany.

Still, the family did not give up hope.

And just days after Deandra last laid eyes on her sister, they received their first bit of news.

Her belongings were found right off the highway, maybe about an hour outside of Shiprock going west.

Why would Tiffany be on that lonely stretch of highway so far from home?

And

could that be the first stop on the road to finding her?

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When you're driving down Route 64, the desert stretches for miles in all directions.

Somewhere along the way, Route 64 intersects with Highway 160.

The landscape is orange and dusty, as far as the eye can see.

So it was surprising when a driver noticed some things littering the side of the road.

Even more remarkable was the decision to pull over.

It just happened to to be my sister's purse and her library card.

Those were the only two things that we could identify as being hers.

And that is not all that was found.

There was clothing also found alongside of the road.

It is clothing that may have belonged to Tiffany.

No one is sure.

I'm not real familiar with the area, but it was past the New Mexico-Arizona border going west.

Then a small reservation community called Sweetwater, Arizona.

If you look it up on like Google Maps, you wouldn't find it.

This was how far from Shiprock?

Maybe about an hour outside of Shiprock going west.

Tiffany ever mentioned that area or having any connection to it?

I don't remember her mentioning that area.

A team of volunteers later searched along that highway, hoping to find more breadcrumbs to follow.

They turned up nothing.

Tiffany's family wondered why Tiffany would be out that way.

One possible explanation.

Some locals have described the area as a frequent party spot for kids.

Deandra says that's not entirely accurate, and she does not believe Tiffany was going to party there.

I think the part that they're referring to as the party spot, it's

up the mountain kind of.

And her stuff wasn't found up the mountain.

It was found alongside the highway.

Yeah, it sounds as if the idea that Tiffany had any connection to the party spot is really pretty far-fetched.

Yes, that's the way I see it.

This feels like another step on the continuum of, well, she ran away from home.

And then they find her stuff and they're like, well, there's a party spot near there.

That's probably what this was.

It feels like police were pretty far off base with both of those ideas.

Yeah, I would say so.

Whatever their theories, police back then also did not have the technological tools you might use to track someone today.

Did she have a cell phone?

No.

Was there ever any video of her from anywhere?

We never heard of any footage of her anywhere.

That was back in 2004, so there weren't ring cameras or

cameras on the street.

I don't even know if there were cameras on the school at that time.

And she didn't have a credit credit card.

No.

Or a debit card?

No.

Tiffany Reed had become an untraceable ghost.

Following the discovery of her person, her library card, there is then a very long period of time when it feels like nothing's happening in the case.

Did you get any updates?

Your family get any updates from police?

No.

My mom was the one calling to the police department to ask for any updates and

you know they were just telling her we're looking into it.

We got some leads and we're looking into it

days became months.

Months became years.

Tiffany's family kept doing everything they could to find her until they faced another devastating blow.

It had been about five years since Tiffany vanished when Deidre Reed, whose cancer had been in remission,

learned that it had returned.

And so we kind of shifted our focus to keeping my mom healthy.

The family had to trust that police were looking for Tiffany while they could not.

We thought law enforcement really was

doing their job and trying to help us locate my sister.

The unknowns kept Tiffany's loved ones on edge.

I was in a really

bad place for

a lot of years after she went missing.

And I ended up having my own addiction to alcohol.

And so that was kind of the path that I took because I didn't know how to deal with my emotions.

I didn't know how to talk about it.

And I got in trouble for that.

And

me getting in trouble kind of like jolted me back into reality.

For Deandra, that jolt launched her in a new direction.

I eventually ended up going back to school, studying criminal justice,

graduated with my associate degree.

And so,

you know, essentially I wanted to be a juvenile probation officer to kind of help with prevention and stuff.

And I took on an internship and that internship led me to advocacy.

It just sparked something inside of me.

I joined a webinar one day

about violence in tribal communities, and

the person that was giving the presentation on the other end brought up my sister's case.

Not even knowing that you were there.

No.

He brought up my sister's case, and

just seeing her face on that screen,

it really touched me to know that there are people who know about her story and

they're talking about all the failures that happened in her case.

Deandra believes those failures lie primarily with police.

Did anybody look into or wonder whether your sister was trafficked?

I don't think they did.

I don't think trafficking was a big thing thing back then, like it is today.

I'm not saying that it wasn't happening, which I'm sure it was, but I don't think anybody ever looked into that.

I don't think they even looked into like sex offenders living in the area, if they even have that data.

There's just a lot of things that I feel they didn't do.

She knows Navajo Nation Police have been receiving tips about her sister over the years.

The question is whether investigators followed up.

I believe one of those tips that came in was she was spotted in somewhere on the east coast.

We never got any word back saying that, no, it wasn't her or them contacting the police department in that area or anything like that.

Still, another lead was about to come, and it was a whopper.

In 2018, 14 years after Tiffany Reed vanished, police stopped a car full of people outside Shiprock.

And Deandra's cousin happened to hear the incident unfold over a police radio.

They were taking their names and that's when she heard my sister's name over the scanner.

Could it really be Tiffany?

After all those years.

I didn't know what to think.

I wanted to go see for myself.

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14 years have passed since Tiffany Reed vanished on the way to school in New Mexico.

In 2018, Tiffany's family heard something they thought could be the answer to their prayers.

So Shiprock is a border town to Farmington.

So we have a cousin who was working with the Farmington Police Department at the time as a community

officer

and she just happened to be on duty the night that a car full of people got pulled over and they were being questioned.

Here's that cousin, Becky Johnson.

I did hear on the scanner they were running,

the officers had made a traffic stop.

And so I heard the dispatcher running names of the people in the vehicle.

And so one of the names caught my ear because I said Tiffany Reed.

And then the date of birth was close to what hers was.

Becky tried to keep her excitement in check.

After all, it had been so long since her younger cousin had vanished.

I didn't know what to think.

All I thought was, we'll see what it is.

I wanted to go see.

I wanted to go see for myself.

She hurried to the scene to see what was going on.

When I got to where the area was and I went to the cars, you know, and I asked the officer, I said, who, who's using the name Tiffany?

And then they pointed to her, to a girl in the back seat and they said to her, Do you know her?

And I and I looked, and that person wouldn't look up.

And I kept saying, Look at me, look at me.

And then

when she looked, I was just like, That's not Tiffany.

A crushing disappointment.

She never gave her name.

And I want to say when they took her to jail, that's when they finally identified her.

You know, and it wasn't Tiffany.

But I always question, you know, why was she using her name?

That is still unclear.

And the whole incident was about to raise another disturbing question

becky says an officer asked her how she knew tiffany reed i was like that's my little cousin and she's missing and then they're like why i said she's been missing for a long time

she says the officers had no idea tiffany had been missing because When they ran her name in the NCIC database, nothing came up.

Becky couldn't believe it.

I said my biggest concern now is why isn't she entered in as a missing person?

The family says that's how they learned Tiffany had been purged from NCIC.

Tiffany's older sister Deandra said she was told authorities switched over to a new database and Tiffany must not have been added back.

All the things that you could imagine going wrong in a case happened with her case.

You thought authorities were looking for her.

They weren't.

Exactly.

It was just failure all around.

Deandra says it took more than a year to get Tiffany relisted.

This just gets worse and worse, doesn't it?

It sure does.

All the cracks that you could think of for her case to fall through, her case fell through those cracks.

For Tiffany's family, it felt like a never-ending ordeal.

That is,

until the next tragedy hit.

In 2019, Tiffany and Deandra's mother, Deidre, died from cancer.

You sort of took this over from your mom after she passed away.

I did.

Before she passed, she

told me not to give up on my sister.

And she asked me to take over.

and bring her home.

I think your mom would be really proud of what you've done.

I think so too.

Even after everything that I've done so far, you know, it just still doesn't feel like enough.

One thing Deandra has tried to do is bring more attention to Tiffany's story.

In July 2024, she reached out to Dateline with a simple plea.

Please help me.

In August, We featured Tiffany's story in our Missing in America digital series.

That was the first time we reached out to police to see if they could comment on Tiffany's case.

At the time, the criminal investigation supervisor said the department could not speak about Tiffany's disappearance, as they are not allowed to comment on active cases.

We attempted to contact them again for this podcast.

and sent them a list of questions about the investigation and the family's accusations.

They did not respond.

Dateline also requested the police records in Tiffany's case, and

we have not received those either.

Today, Deandra sits on the New Mexico Department of Justice MMIP Task Force.

That's missing and murdered indigenous people.

She also works for the Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women.

Tiffany Haron is the executive director of the coalition.

Our organization was developed by three Native women who come from the Pueblos that reside here in New Mexico and Wendina women.

The coalition's mission is to raise awareness about violence against Native women in their tribal communities,

about the missing and murdered indigenous women crisis, about human trafficking.

and about violence against children.

We support the 23 tribal nations of New Mexico with policy advocacy work, training and education.

This is a giant hill to climb, isn't it?

It is.

And most of the staff who come to do this work at the organization find themselves being impacted by domestic or sexual violence, by being victims themselves.

We know that the violence impacts our communities

so much more than

we see in statistics.

Those statistics are as eye-opening as they are depressing.

According to a 2016 study by the National Institute of Justice, more than 80% of Indigenous women will be assaulted or experience violence in their lifetime.

That is a really hard number to deal with.

I'm a survivor myself coming to this work, so I know exactly the experiences of women going through violence.

We lack a lot of support even when we are trying to report a missing loved one.

There's

a strong sense that law enforcement doesn't take this necessarily serious.

Tiffany was originally labeled a runaway.

Now, how does that happen?

Nobody called and said she's run away.

How did it go from her being missed by her family to law enforcement labeling her a runaway?

And that's often what we hear from law enforcement.

There's often a bias about Native American families that is often untrue.

And it's really unfair to state that a young Native girl, you know, just was dealing with a lot of things and decided to run away.

I know that my coworker, her sister, Deandra Reed, has never given up on trying to find justice and also trying to find answers for her sister.

And this was the work that her and her mother were doing all on their own.

Because if you're counting on law enforcement, you're probably making a mistake in that case.

Oftentimes, that's the way we feel.

Yes.

The state of New Mexico recently took a step in a new direction.

Earlier this year, the legislature passed a bill to create something called a turquoise alert, like an amber alert, but for when Native Americans go missing.

It went into effect on July 1, 2025.

So if you'd had the turquoise alert back in 2004, you think things with Tiffany would have ended differently?

Absolutely.

I think this is going to be life-changing and even life-saving for Native American people.

Despite all the challenges she has faced over the last two decades, Deandra remains more determined than ever.

I hope to eventually take my sister's case over.

I'm still going to school for criminal justice and

one of the things that will help help me is taking the bar exam for the navajo nation i want to know what's going on with my sister's case so i'm working my way to actually be a part of that system

deandra still tries to hold on to hope whenever she can do you think your sister's still alive

this is a question that could go both ways for me depending on

what kind of a day I'm having.

I would like to hang on to that hope because we haven't found anything so far indicating that she's not here anymore.

And then I also know that a lot of time has passed with

no word.

And it just,

it's a hard question.

It really is.

And until we find her,

you know, good or bad, I'm going to hang on to that hope that she's still alive.

And if Deandra's worst fears are confirmed, what does justice look like in this for you?

Holding the person or people

accountable for what they've done or what they did or what they're doing.

Whoever they are.

Whoever they are.

All I really want is for my sister to be home.

I just want to know where she is.

And what I really want

is for the Criminal Investigator's Office and the Shiprock Police Department to be accountable for their actions and the failures that they have, you know, done with my sister's case.

Deandra sometimes lets her mind wander.

If Tiffany were alive, what would she be like?

What she would be doing today, what kind of impact she would make,

what kind of person she would be, what kind of relationship we would have had, what kind of auntie she would have been to my kids if she would have had her own kids, you you know i just have a lot of what-if questions

and i probably always will have those questions

here is how you can help tiffany reed would be 37 years old today she was 5'3 and 115 pounds at the time of her disappearance she had dark black hair and brown eyes She has a scar under her right eye and a scar on one of her arms.

Anyone with information about Tiffany's disappearance should call the Navajo Nation Police Department Shiprock District at 505-368-1350.

To look at pictures of Tiffany and age-progressed images created by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and to learn about other people we've covered in our Missing in America series, go to datelinemissinginamerica.com.

You will also be able to submit cases there you think we should cover in the future.

Thanks for listening.

See you Fridays on Dateline on NBC.

Missing in America is a production of Dateline and NBC News.

Veronica Mazeka is the producer and editor of this episode.

Bradley Davis is senior producer.

Paul Ryan is executive producer.

And Liz Cole is senior executive producer.

From NBC News Audio, Sound Mixing by Robert Ceciliano, Bryson Barnes is head of audio production.

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