Fourteen-year-old Emily Pike’s only home up to last year was in the mountainous community of Peridot on the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation in southeastern Arizona.
But after she was sexually assaulted, Emily was pulled from her family and the life she knew and placed in foster care nearly 100 miles away. The homesick teen was in a Mesa group home on the night she climbed out her bedroom window in January.
Three weeks after Emily was reported missing, her dismembered remains were found Valentine’s Day in trash bags along US 60, north of Globe in Gila County, not far from the San Carlos Apache reservation.
A joint legislative oversight committee recently convened a hearing to consider solutions to safeguard children in the custody of state-sanctioned group homes. What they found included a lack of communication, collaboration and oversight that ultimately led to Emily’s murder…