A 14-year-old girl who was found dismembered on the side of a road in Arizona had previously told police that she hated the group home she had vanished from when she had run away years earlier, new body camera footage shows.
Emily Pike was murdered after she disappeared on Jan. 27 from the Mesa group home, run by Sacred Journey Inc. — where she was reported missing three different times before in 2023, according to ABC 15.
New bodycam footage of one of the previous incidents, dated Sept. 20, 2023, shows Emily walking along a canal when an officer calls her name repeatedly as he approaches her and asks her to stop.
“I don’t want to go back,” she tells the officer, breaking down into tears and pleading to see her mom.
The teen, whose family lives on the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation, insists that the facility is not her home, telling the cop she’d rather live with her grandmother instead, the video obtained by ABC 15 shows.
At one point in the clip, she tells the officers no one understands her or is going to help her.
“I’m not going to go to that f–cking group home,” Emily says. “I hate it there.”
In each of the times Emily went missing in 2023, she was either returned to the home or taken to a behavioral health center within a matter of hours, the outlet reported.
In another bodycam recording taken the day she went missing more than a year later, an officer receives a phone call from a group home employee claiming Emily was gone, which she relayed was something she’d done before.
“I looked under the bed and the closet,” the female staffer, who said she’d worked with the company for 11 years, told police. “I looked outside. The gate was open. The screen door, the screen window was kicked out.”
Emily’s body was later found on the side of a dirt road off of US 60. It took authorities weeks to confirm the remains belonged to Emily.
Her autopsy results showed she suffered visible face and head trauma.
A head and torso were discovered in large bags with her legs in separate bags, but the girl’s arms and hands were not found, the Gila County Sheriff’s Office said after she was identified.
Police said in March they had identified three suspects in the savage slaying — however, no arrests have been made, according to ABC 15.
The Mesa Police Department, Federal Bureau of Investigation and Bureau of Indian Affairs have organized a task force to track down Emily’s killer.
“She was just an innocent … she was a baby,” the girl’s devastated mother, Steff Dosela, said after her death was confirmed.
The Department of Child Safety told lawmakers at a legislative hearing on group home protocol last month that Emily was in the care of Tribal Social Services and was placed in the care of Sacred Journey Inc. by the tribe, according to ABC 15.
San Carlos Apache Attorney General Alex Richie said the group home alerted police and Tribal Social Services, however, CPS was not convinced she was actually missing “because of the child’s past behaviors.”
