In January of 2022, a 21-year-old Indigenous woman named Aidan Spear disappeared from Tacoma, Washington, under heartbreaking circumstances. Aidan had been facing challenges with her mental health and substance abuse, but a moment of hope arrived when she agreed to seek help. On the morning of January 24, 2022, she was scheduled to meet her mother, Jessica Brown, to begin a treatment program.
Shortly before they were supposed to meet, Aidan sent a message to her mother, explaining that she needed to say goodbye to someone and would be late. That was the last time her mother ever heard from her. Aidan, who her family described as a 'genuinely kind human being' and a member of the Colville and Coeur d'Alene tribes, never arrived.
In the weeks following Aidan's last message, her family held onto hope, as it was not entirely unusual for her to be out of contact for short periods. However, that hope turned to panic about three weeks later when one of Aidan's close friends, who was usually aware of her whereabouts, contacted her mother to ask how the rehabilitation was going. Realizing something was seriously wrong, Brown filed a missing person's report with the Pierce County Sheriff's Office. Aidan's case cast a light on the wider crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous people; she vanished just a few months before Washington state instituted its Missing Indigenous Person Alert system, a tool created to address such disappearances. For years, her family searched, and her mother spoke of the pain of watching her daughter struggle without feeling there was a system in place to provide adequate support.
The painful uncertainty for Aidan's family came to a close four years after she vanished. In January 2026, human remains were discovered in an isolated, wooded area on Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Spanaway, a location that is accessible to the public. After months of forensic analysis, authorities confirmed in April 2026 that the remains were those of Aidan Spear. Her death is now the subject of a joint investigation by the Pierce County Sheriff's Office and the Department of the Army Criminal Investigation Division. The case of Aidan Spear is a tragic story of a young woman who disappeared at the very moment she was ready to accept help for her struggles. The discovery of her remains ended a long and agonizing search for her family, but it also opened a new chapter as investigators now work to determine the circumstances surrounding her death.Last Seen: Jan 21, 2022
