Who Killed Emily Pike? Arizona Teen’s Dismemberment Murder Still Unsolved One Year Later

In the evening of Jan. 27, 2025, Arizona 14-year-old Emily Pike crawled out of the bedroom window of her group home in Mesa, Ariz. She would never be seen alive again.

Her dismembered remains were discovered on Feb. 14 — about 100 miles away from the group home — in two large trash bags near Forest Road 355 on state land near the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation, per a May FBI press release.

According to AZ Family, investigators were unable to find her arms and hands. An autopsy determined the young member of the San Carlos Apache Tribe died from “homicidal violence with blunt head trauma,” ABC15 reported.

Where Emily went after she left the group home, how she ended up 100 miles away in a wooded area, and who killed her, remain unclear.

“What happened to her and the way it happened is heartbreaking,” Emily’s aunt Carolyn Pike-Bender tells PEOPLE. “It’s a nightmare. It’s a horror movie, and it doesn’t feel real. Even now, it doesn’t feel real.”

After her death, Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs signed “Emily’s Law,” a bill that would establish an alert system for endangered people and tribal members under 65 who have vanished under suspicious circumstances in the state, Fox 10 reported.

The teen ran away from the Mesa group home three times in 2023, ABC15 reported.

In one instance, in September 2023, she was found by police walking along a canal after being reported missing.

In police body cam video obtained by ABC15, she told an officer, “I just want to see my mom,” adding that she wanted to stay with her grandma.

“I’m not going to go to that f—ing group home,” she said. “I hate it there.” Despite her complaints, she eventually got into the car with the officer, per the outlet.

On Jan. 27, a staff member at the group home called 911 around 8:30 p.m. and said they found the gate of the home was open and the screen window had been kicked out, per ABC15.

“She’s got a pink and gray striped long-sleeved shirt,” the staff member said. “That’s what one of the girls here at the group home said she had.”

A former roommate of Emily’s told AZ Family that Emily took off because she wanted to go see a boy she’d met at guitar lessons. She reportedly left around the same time a church group was visiting the group home, per the roommate, according to AZ Family.

“What it looked like was that the church was there, and that served as a distraction of when Emily left,” the friend said. “She left because she wanted to go out and see the boy she liked, and she wanted to talk to him. She either used the back door or used the window and left as everyone was distracted.”

The former roommate believes Emily’s plan was to return to her family home.

“I feel like she just ran away, and she was trying to hitchhike back to her reservation to see her parents, and she just got picked up by the wrong person,” the roommate said, per AZ Family.

Pike-Bender believes that Emily’s plan was always to return home.

“That was always her intention, to go back home to her mom,” she says. “Her mindset was not to go run off to go do something like any other teenager would do. Her mom and her siblings were all that she had on her mind.”

Pike-Bender says she wants her niece, who loved pink, sparkly things, shopping, art and her cat, to be remembered as a happy teen with a big smile.

“She was just leaving the little girl stage, going into the preteen stage, but yet, not yet fully teenager-wise,” she says. “She was trying to find herself, but she was also trying to be a mother and a big sister to her younger siblings. She was getting in the age of liking boys.”

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She hopes that by keeping Emily’s story out in the public, her case will one day be solved.

“I feel that somebody might remember something,” she says. “It’s sad the way that she left this world, but she’s doing something for everyone else out there. She’s shedding light on Native, indigenous people, that their lives matter too, just as much as hers.”

“I just refuse to lose hope,” she adds. “She didn’t leave this world for nothing, and whoever took her life, is going to get that judgment one day and that might not be here in this world, but it’ll be maybe in the afterlife.”