It’s been just over 20 years since Deiandra Reid saw her younger sister, 16-year-old Tiffany Reid.
It was May 17, 2004. “I was working a graveyard shift and so I got back about 5:00 in the morning, maybe almost 6:00,” Deiandra told Dateline. “She woke me up to take her to school that day.”
“I was just too tired, and I couldn’t wake up,” Deiandra said. So Tiffany ended up walking to Shiprock Northwest High School in her hometown of Shiprock, New Mexico -- a community located on the Navajo Reservation in San Juan County. Tiffany and her family were enrolled with the Navajo Nation tribe.
Deiandra says Tiffany would often make the 10-minute walk to or from school by herself. “I feel like her, you know, her full intention was to go to school because she had all the things that she would typically take with her on the school day,” Deiandra said.
After getting some more sleep, Deiandra went about her day and returned to her home in Farmington — about half an hour away. Later that evening, she got a call from their mother, Dedra. “My mom called me and told me [Tiffany] wasn’t back yet and [asked] if I had heard from her,” she said. Deiandra hadn’t. “I thought maybe, well, she-- maybe she just stayed after school for something,” she said.
The next morning, on May 18, Deiandra got another call from her mom, who said Tiffany never came home the night before. “She said, ‘I just wanted to call you first to make sure that you haven’t heard [from her],’” Deiandra said. “I said, ‘No, I haven’t.’”
That’s when their mom called the school. They informed Dedra that Tiffany had not arrived that day. “That’s when she asked, ‘Was she there yesterday?’ And they said, ‘No, she wasn’t here yesterday, either,’” Deiandra said. “So that’s when I think the panic really set in.”
Deiandra says her family tried to report Tiffany missing, but were unable to initially.
Dateline reached out to the Navajo Nation Police Department Shiprock District to ask about Tiffany’s case.
The Criminal Investigations Supervisor Dale West told Dateline their department cannot comment on Tiffany’s case, as they are not allowed to comment on active cases. He did mention that the FBI was also involved in the investigation, and that they are working in conjunction on it. Dateline called the nearest FBI office for comment, as well. They responded by email that they were unable to confirm their involvement in Tiffany’s case, but “would certainly welcome tips or information” about her disappearance.
Deiandra says her mother was able to file a missing person report 72 hours after Tiffany disappeared. The family went out to search for her themselves, checking anywhere they could think of on the Navajo Nation reservation. “We were definitely out looking for her,” Deiandra said, adding that they hung flyers and checked in with Tiffany’s friends and the places they would frequent. “It was just weird because nobody had heard from her, nobody had seen her.”
Deiandra says her sister was labeled a runaway, but the family doesn’t agree with that assessment. “She wasn’t that type,” Deiandra said. She described Tiffany as shy and quiet growing up, but as she hit her teen years -- she was starting to come out of her shell a bit more. “She was just barely coming into her own self, like, figuring out who she was as a, you know, as a young lady,” she said. “She wasn’t fighting at school. She wasn’t causing problems.” Deiandra did say Tiffany had snuck out before — but she was never gone for long.
About a week or two after Tiffany vanished, some of her belongings were recovered. Her purse and library card were found scattered along a road in Arizona, just across the New Mexico border.
“Somebody had, I guess, saw her stuff thrown out on the road and they stopped,” Deiandra told Dateline. “One of the things that they picked up -- it was my sister’s purse, um, that she used to carry with her that had her name on the inside — well, her nickname on the inside of it.” Her nickname is Kay-C.
Deiandra believes the person who found the belongings put two and two together after seeing the flyers posted around town and Tiffany’s story in the local media. “They called my mom to let her know and from there, my mom called the police department,” she said. According to Deiandra, some of the items found were identified as belonging to Tiffany, but others were not. Deiandra said a non-profit organization that doesn’t exist anymore searched the area but, ultimately, found nothing of note.
Eventually, it wasn’t just the pain of Tiffany’s disappearance the family had to deal with. “When my sister went missing, my mom was in remission,” Deiandra said. “Not long after that, she developed breast cancer again so we kind of had to shift our, you know, our focus to my mom to get her healthy.”
Months turned into years with no movement in Tiffany’s case. Then, in 2018, the family learned Tiffany was not even listed in the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) system.
“We have a cousin who used to work for Farmington Police Department,” Deiandra said. “She was on duty one evening and she heard my sister’s name all over the scanner.”
Deiandra and Tiffany’s cousin, Becky Johnson, told Dateline what she remembered from working that night. “I was a community service officer, so I wasn’t sworn,” she said. “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.”
It was the name of her missing cousin: Tiffany Reid. “I’m like, ‘Why is somebody using Tiffany’s name?’” Becky recalled.
She says the dispatcher said nothing came up when they ran the name in the system. Becky remembers wondering, “‘Wait, why isn’t she coming back as missing?’” So Becky headed down to the scene. “I went to the cars, you know, and I asked the officer, I said, ‘Who -- who’s using the name Tiffany?’ And they pointed to her -- to a girl in the back seat,” Becky said.
“I was just like, ‘That’s not Tiffany,’” she said, and told the officers that Tiffany Reid was the name of her cousin who had been missing for more than a decade. “When they took [the woman] to jail, that’s when they finally identified her and it wasn’t Tiffany, but I always questioned, you know, why she was using her name?”
After that, Becky was determined to find out why Tiffany wasn’t coming up as a missing person when they ran her name. And she was determined to get her name added to the NCIC database.
“They had a public meeting, and I went to that meeting where Navajo Nation police were there and they were, like, taking concerns and stuff from the community,” Becky told Dateline. “And so, I asked specifically, I said, ‘Why is [Tiffany] not coming up missing?’”
Becky says a senior officer responded. “He just said, ‘Oh, she must be one of the people that got purged,’” Becky said. “And I go, ‘What do you mean got purged?’ And he’s like, ‘Well, I guess at one time, all our missing people got purged out of the database and we thought we entered everybody back in but Tiffany must have not been re-entered.’”
Becky says she then asked him what he was going to do about it and if he could get Tiffany entered back into the system. “He’s like, ‘We’ll look into it.’”
Becky says she never got a clear answer as to why Tiffany, or any other missing people, would have been purged from the system. Dateline reached out to both the Navajo Nation Police Department Shiprock District records section and the Criminal Investigations Unit to ask about the missing people being purged from the system but has not received a response.
Not long after, Becky became part of the New Mexico Missing and Murdered Task Force. “The only way I got help was by being on a task force and pushing and pushing and talking to a lot of people,” she said. One person from the task force put her in contact with a U.S. Marshal, who was eventually able to get Tiffany relisted as a missing person. “It would be nice if we could find her or, you know, at least find her remains,” Becky said. “At the end of the day, it’s just-- it’s just being able to know Tiffany’s home with us.”
Deiandra Reid remembers that even as their mother was battling cancer, she would call the police to check in on Tiffany’s case as much as she could. “I think she kind of knew, like, she was getting close,” she said. “So she handed [me] all my sister’s papers and, you know, what very little documents she [had].” Dedra was officially passing the baton to Deiandra. “She told me to keep searching for my sister and not give up,” Deiandra said.
Dedra died in 2019, not knowing what happened to Tiffany. “After my mom passed, that basically just became my whole mission,” Deiandra said. “I picked up all the advocacy and all the things for her and just kind of got it going again.”
Deiandra is now the one fighting fiercely for her baby sister. “I’m really hopeful that she’s still out there,” she said. However, she added, “I know this much time has passed and I just feel like if somebody knew what happened to her, they should have already said something by now.”
Tiffany Reid was 5’3” and 115 lbs. 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. She would be 36 years old today.
If you have any information about the disappearance of Tiffany Reid, please contact the Navajo Nation Police Department Shiprock District at 505-368-1350 or the FBI at 1-800-CALL-FBI.
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