Lost and Found: The Disappearance of Emily Hollis — Part 1

(Editor’s note: The following story is Part I of a three-part article that delves into every parent’s nightmare — the disappearance of their child. It is also a call for Christians to be sensitive to the Holy Spirit’s leading and for churches to take action. And finally, it’s a warning to teens and preteens who see social media as a place to share their lives, but may be unaware of traffickers and groomers who could potentially target them.  


Twelve-year-old Emily Hollis had been missing from her South Carolina home for 3 ½ days. When the Florida Highway Patrol miraculously found Emily due to a stranger’s tip, her parents, Kiel and Autumn, were told Emily was found “safe and unharmed.”

But was she really “safe and unharmed”?

MEET EMILY

Described by her parents as a girl with a bubbly personality and a willingness to help beyond that of a typical preteen, Emily loved playing soccer, got good grades, and was a regular part of the Praise Assembly of God youth group in Beaufort, South Carolina (pop. 13,594).

“She’s kind and she always willing to help me,” Autumn says of her daughter. “Sometimes I come home, and the entire kitchen will be cleaned — she would just do things like that. She loves to help me out.”

Kiel says he enjoyed laughing with Emily and just being around her — being Dad.

But then, in fall 2024, Emily started attending a new, well-respected school — Bridges Preparatory — and roughly at the same time, entered puberty. The combination of entering puberty and transitioning from home schooling to attending a charter school (a focus on STEM) brought a whole new set of emotions and challenges.

“It was November, and I remember Autumn telling me how Emily got in trouble at school,” says Vonna Allen, Autumn’s mother and an AG U.S. Missions Chaplain and missions associate who served with the Widows Link ministry. “Her parents decided an appropriate punishment was to take her phone away.”

Although Vonna, Autumn, and Kiel were caught off guard by the issues at school, they decided to address them quickly — they wanted to help Emily become more self-confident and to make better choices, with Kiel noting they felt Emily was making poor decisions based on low self-esteem.

According to Michael Bartel, founder of F.R.E.E. (Find, Restore, Embrace, Empower) International with his wife, Denise, low self-esteem creates one of the larger vulnerabilities in individuals that predators, traffickers, and groomers can — and do — exploit to their advantage. But the outlandish thought of Emily ever being trafficked never entered the Hollises’ minds — that was something that only happened in other parts of the world and especially not in their small, homey community!

“We realized Emily was making some poor choices, so we really monitored who she was hanging out with — we tried to help her focus more on friends out of the church instead of out of the school,” Kiel says. “We also put her in MMA (mixed martial arts) and boxing, and her grandmother (Vonna) started taking her to horseback riding lessons on Saturdays — all of which were steps to build her self-esteem.”

But Emily was in the midst of emotional upheaval — self-doubts mixed with a battle for independence, yet still in need of the guidance, wisdom, and love of her parents. Little did she — or anyone — know, this wasn’t just the beginning of a typical parent/adolescent power struggle . . . her multiple “small, but poor” decisions were leading her down a very dangerous path.

THE PATH

Although Kiel, Autumn, and Vonna along with her husband, Philip, were doing their best to support Emily, at the same time, Emily’s school friends were drawing her in a different direction. According to Focus on the Family, for many parents, once kids get in with the wrong crowd of friends, it’s a difficult battle as kids at school — good or not-so-good — have far more access to their children during the week either in person or by phone.

In January, one of Emily’s school friends did her a “favor” and secretly gave her a burner phone (typically available at retail stores and requires no registration).

“We had always been very careful to limit what social media was available on Emily’s phone,” Kiel says. “No Facebook, Snapchat, Discord, Twitch — none of that. We know the type of people that can be on there.”

However, now that Emily had a phone free from supervision, she loaded it with the apps she was previously denied.

Although this was not the first deception of her parents that Emily had seemingly gotten away with, it would prove to be her most costly.

Now able to follow her friends “having fun and going to parties,” Emily grew discontent. Her comments on other’s postings and her other thoughts and images she shared on social media — in what she believed was just her own self-expression — were actually making her an obvious and easy target for groomers and traffickers.

For the Hollises, the Emily they knew slowly began to vanish, being replaced by a child that was “grumpy and tired” all the time.

But was her demeanor just the impact of puberty? According to an article adapted from the Complete Guide to Baby & Child Care, puberty impacts children in a variety of ways, including dramatic physical and emotional changes. Children can often become more irritable, moodier, withdrawn and “wide mood swings and strong emotional responses to the ups and downs of life are the order of the day.”

But something evil was also now in play.

GROOMED

“We learned that on Jan. 31, Emily got a friend request from a 16-year-old boy on Snapchat who she didn’t know,” Kiel says. “A day later, she accepted his friend request and followed him back . . . and 14 days later, she was gone.”

The contact could easily have been from an older individual or sexual predator posing as a 16-year-old, but the reality of what was going on was possibly just as — if not more — frightening.

Kiel explains that Emily had made herself vulnerable as she was seeking affirmation and the “understanding” that, she, like many her age, believed her parents lacked.

Whether or not the young man found Emily by chance or if he was guided to her by others is still in question. However, once friended, he quickly gained Emily’s confidence by complimenting her, empathizing with her, and moving relatively quickly to working on meeting with her and convincing her that she deserved better.

“Kids are putting their whole world on social media,” says Michael Bartel, who serves with Denise as U.S. missionaries with Gospel Outreach Ministries. “Traffickers are easily able to figure out what their needs are (from kids’ posts), and they start to groom them by filling those holes . . . often playing the empathy card — ‘Your parents don’t understand, but I do.’”

Quickly infatuated by the attentions of an older boy who “understood” her, Emily began sneaking out of the house late at night and meeting up with him — which quickly escalated into him giving her drugs and sexually taking advantage of her infatuation and lowered inhibitions due to drug use. She had no idea how the boy was manipulating her.

Although it would be easy to think this was due to a lack of good parenting or declare, “My child would never . . .,” Bartel gives reason to pause.

“You can be the most locked-in 12-year-old in the history of the planet, and you would still lack the reasoning skills,” he says, noting how deceptive and convincing traffickers can be. “That’s why family, church, and godly community in general are so important — they help create a Teflon barrier.”

But for Emily, the process into being trafficked was textbook: empathize, fill holes, build relationship with non-stop texting, meet, reduce inhibitions with drugs, break down sexual barriers with an older boyfriend who “loves you.” The next step — get her isolated.

Kiel and Autumn along with Grandma Vonna and Grandpa Philip, had no idea that Emily was deceiving them — they thought they were doing the right things to help Emily build good relationships and self-esteem.

Yet, by the second week of February, the Hollises were unknowingly in a losing battle — the emotional, mental, and now sexual attachment to this older boy controlled Emily’s thoughts and decisions. He had convinced her that her life was horrible and that it would be so much better with him. Kiel says he recalls how Emily was increasingly grouchy and abnormally tired that week, but he had no idea why.

“I checked on Emily about 11:30 p.m. on Saturday (Feb. 15) night,” Kiel recalls. “Bay, the dog, was on her bed with her, sleeping like normal . . .”

The only problem was, Bay was actually sleeping next to Emily’s pillows — she had sneaked out of the house earlier, only this time she had no intentions of returning as she and her “boyfriend” drove off into the night.

(This is the conclusion of Part 1 of a three-part story describing the disappearance and rescue of 12-year-old Emily Hollis — including how God intervened through an attentive believer and the unexpected difficulties the Hollis family faced.  Click here to read Part 2.) 

Image: Due to privacy concerns, a stock photo has been used for this article.