If you’ve seen the new docuseries Missing: Dead or Alive on Netflix, you may wonder what happened to Sierra Stevens, the 17-year-old beauty school student who went missing in Columbia, South Carolina.
The series follows four South Carolina missing persons cases through to their completion.
In Episode 4, Sierra’s foster mother calls the police and reports her missing when she doesn’t come home after a night out with friends. When Sierra Stevens still doesn’t return home after a few days, Investigators Vicki Rains and Heidi Jackson intensified their search, worrying that she might have been kidnapped and forced into sex trafficking. This was a valid fear since there was a presence of that activity in the area where Sierra Stevens lived.
Their fears only worsened when Sierra’s grandfather, Pat King, tells the investigators that he called Sierra’s phone, and a man he didn’t know answered.
The investigators searched local motels and tried to track down leads on where Sierra Stevens was the last night she was seen and what could have happened to her.
(L to R) Sierra Stevens’ grandparents Christina King and Pat King in Missing: Dead or Alive? Courtesy of Netflix.Was Sierra Stevens Found Dead or Alive?
To Investigator Rains’ relief, one of Sierra’s friends was able to call her, and she picked up the phone.
Rains went to meet Sierra and another friend’s house where she was staying and was surprised to learn that Sierra had been hiding. Sierra was afraid that she would have to go back to the juvenile detention center where she had done time for accidentally killing a 32-year-old in a car accident a few years earlier when she ran a stop sign while driving underage without a license.
She ended up in foster care because her father had been charged with child neglect for leaving his then 14-year-old daughter with access to the car she was driving during the accident.
But when Inv. Rains found Sierra, she told her she was never in any trouble. The police were just concerned for her safety.
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“We were just so worried about you and trying to find you,” Inv. Rains said in Episode 4.
Then Sierra explained what happened from her perspective.
“I was at my foster home and I was going to a party, you know, and I asked, and they said, yeah, I just had to be back by a certain time,” Stevens said.
“I ended up falling asleep, and then early that morning, I woke up and I was like, okay, I’m going back to the house, so I went back to the house and then I seen five cop cars in the yard. I was like, Oh my god, I’m going back to jail. I’m scared, I didn’t know what to do. I was in panic mode. I saw the police — I wasn’t thinking, I just ducked.”
She called her best friend, Emily, and hid at her house until she learned from another friend that the police weren’t going to arrest her.
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“We were afraid something bad was happening to you or that you were being held against your will. But now that we have found you and everything, and it’s like, oh, she was afraid of us — that’s so sad. Had we known, we could have said, you know, like on the news, ‘Sierra, you’re not in trouble, we’re trying to help you and make sure you’re safe,’” Inv. Rains said.
“I would have never thought the police would try to help me,” Stevens responded.
All four episodes of Missing: Dead or Alive? are now streaming on Netflix.
Main Image: A missing poster for Sierra Stevens pictured in Missing: Dead or Alive? Photo credit: Netflix.