On July 26, 2022, sixteen year old Susana Morales left a friend’s apartment in Norcross, Georgia, and started the short walk back toward her home. It was late, the kind of humid summer night when familiar streets can feel quieter than usual and routine habits can blur into the background. Susana was a teenager with a full life ahead of her, and nothing about the moment suggested that this would become the last time her family would see her alive.
In the hours that followed, Susana did not arrive home. The normal explanations that families cling to in the first wave of fear, a phone battery dying, a friend offering a ride, a misunderstanding about where she was staying, quickly gave way to the heavier reality that something had gone wrong.
The Disappearance That Became a Homicide
Susana’s case began as a missing teenager report, but it did not remain there. Investigators later treated the case as a homicide, concluding that Susana had been taken and killed. What made the early days especially difficult was the gap between the last known sighting and the clarity that usually comes from physical evidence. For families, that gap is torture. Each day without answers forces them to live inside questions that have no safe endings.
Her loved ones pushed for attention and urgency, because time matters in missing person cases. A community can feel supportive and helpless at the same time, sharing posts, calling in tips, and scanning routes that seem ordinary until they become part of a tragedy.
The Search for Answers
As days turned into weeks, then months, the investigation expanded. Detectives worked to rebuild the last stretch of Susana’s movements, using the kinds of modern tools that often shape contemporary cases, including phone data and location information. They also looked for any sign that a vehicle had intercepted her walk, or that someone had been waiting in the area…