Maria Lazaro Avila was a 14-year-old girl when she disappeared from Phoenix, Arizona, shortly before Christmas 2021. Public missing-person records place her last known sighting on December 21, 2021, in the area of North 9th Street and East Euclid Avenue in south Phoenix. Although some current listings now estimate Maria to be about 18 years old, she was still a young teenager when she vanished.
She was described at the time as approximately 5 feet 8 inches tall and weighing about 150 pounds, with black hair and brown eyes. Maria is also identified in missing-person advocacy records as an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Community.
Very little has been made public about what happened before Maria was last seen or the circumstances that caused concern for her safety. Available records do not provide a detailed account of where she was going, who may have been with her, what she was wearing, or whether she left the area on foot or in a vehicle. What is consistently documented is the location near North 9th Street and East Euclid Avenue and the fact that Maria subsequently became the subject of a missing-person investigation. Her case was entered into the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System under case number MP87811, preserving her identifying information and disappearance details in a national database available to investigators and the public.
As time passed, Maria's disappearance continued to circulate through organizations devoted to bringing attention to missing Indigenous people and other long-term missing-person cases. A 2023 profile devoted to Native missing persons described Maria as still missing and emphasized how few details surrounding her disappearance had been released publicly. That lack of information has made her case especially difficult for the public to understand: there is no widely reported sequence of events explaining what happened after she was seen in Phoenix, and publicly available accounts do not identify a confirmed destination, companion, vehicle, or subsequent sighting. The limited information leaves a painful gap between the ordinary moment when Maria was last known to be in the neighborhood and the years of uncertainty that followed.
Current public listings continue to identify Maria Lazaro Avila as a missing person, with her case connected to the December 21, 2021 disappearance from Phoenix and the same physical description recorded when she was 14. No publicly available information located for this synopsis provides a confirmed explanation for her disappearance or establishes what happened to her after she was last seen near North 9th Street and East Euclid Avenue. Her case therefore remains defined by a small number of known facts and many unanswered questions: a teenage girl disappeared from a Phoenix neighborhood, her information was entered into national missing-person systems, and years later her whereabouts remain publicly unresolved. Anyone who remembers seeing Maria around the time she disappeared, encountered her afterward, or has information that could help establish where she went may still hold an important piece of a case that has remained without publicly reported answers.Last Seen: Dec 27, 2021
