A 15-year-old girl who vanished from Denver’s Villa Park neighborhood nine days ago has been found safe, prompting state investigators to cancel the emergency alert issued in her name. Jenavecia Blea was last seen walking away from the 1200 block of North Knox Court on August 11 at approximately 10 a.m., according to the missing person alert issued by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. She is Cherokee and Oglala Sioux, and the alert described her as 5-foot-3, 110 pounds, with brown hair, brown eyes, and a butterfly-with-a-red-heart tattoo on the right side of her chest.
The Colorado Bureau of Investigation announced Blea’s safe recovery Thursday evening in a post on its official X account, writing simply that she had been located safely and thanking the public for its assistance, according to CBI. The Missing Indigenous Person Alert had been requested by the Denver Police Department, which handled media inquiries about the case at 720-913-2000. Only the local agency that requested a Missing Indigenous Person Alert can formally ask the state to cancel it once someone is found, per the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.
Neither the Denver Police Department nor CBI has released details about where Blea was found or the circumstances of her disappearance, information that remains unpublicized given privacy protections for minors. Villa Park is a residential neighborhood in West Denver that includes the North Knox Court block where Blea was last seen, according to reporting cited in a roundup from Denver Post coverage of the case.
A Fast-Moving Statewide Alert System
Blea’s case moved through a legal framework built specifically for situations like hers. Under Colorado Senate Bill 22-150, signed into law in 2022, local police who receive a report of a missing Indigenous child must notify the Colorado Bureau of Investigation within two hours — compared with an eight-hour window for missing adults, according to the Colorado General Assembly. Once activated, a Missing Indigenous Person Alert pushes case details out to law enforcement networks, local media outlets, and Colorado Department of Transportation highway message signs, per CBI…