Sarah Merrill fears her 14-year-old daughter, Ella Jones, left home to meet a man she met online. No one has heard from Ella since the Washington state teen vanished on Jan. 5. "I know something's really wrong," she tells Inside Edition Digital.
“We had a normal evening... I was tired. It had been a long week at work and it was about just shy of nine, and I said I was going to go to bed and she laid down with me and we laid in bed and she gave me a hug and said goodnight, and that was the last time I saw her,” Sarah Merrill, the mother of 14-year-old Ella Jones, who has been missing since Jan. 5, tells Inside Edition Digital.
It has been over 20 days since Ella's family has had any communication with the teenager from Washington state. Her disappearance has left her loved ones terrified of what could have happened and spurred them to take to social media to appeal to the masses to help search for the teen.
Ella Jones is approximately five feet, five inches tall and weighs roughly 130 pounds. She has brown eyes, brown hair and “very distinct” dimples, according to her mother. She is believed to be in the Mount Vernon area. It’s possible she traveled to other cities in Washington.
Merrill fears her daughter was lured away by a man on social media who she believes may be named Keith and is in his mid 30s.
Merrill painfully recalled when she realized that her teenage daughter was missing. She says that the next morning as she was making breakfast, she didn’t hear any noise coming from Ella’s room. Merrill thought her daughter was sleeping, as many teens do, but when she went into her daughter’s bedroom between 11 a.m. and 11:30 a.m., she discovered she was gone.
She has been walking on pins and needles ever since.
Merrill immediately filed a missing person’s report with the local police. However, she says much of the information she has able to gather about what may have happened to her daughter has come from Ella’s peers.
“We're getting information from teenagers, so different teenagers have slightly different tidbits that they've shared. The whole picture is not necessarily clear and straightforward. Whether that was intentional or not, I don't know,” she says. “But a lot of the kids were under the impression that his name was Keith... I wouldn't imagine someone's out there doing these types of things using their own name. And we were able to gather that she had been talking to him for months. So this was going back at least into October, if not before that.”
She says Ella is a typical teenager who loves being around people, enjoys the great outdoors and is always up for adventure. She says she and her daughter have a “close relationship” and a solid foundation and that there were no signs indicating she would want to leave, especially just after the holidays, which the worried mom said were “normal.”
“In the first few days, I spent all day, almost every day, trying to get more information for our digital footprint in the house, trying to figure out passcodes and what accounts she had, to try to figure out who this man [Keith] is,” Merrill says. “The very first thing I did was go to her good friend's house. I spoke to her friend, her parents, they started reaching out to other friends and parents that they had contacts with, and it was not long before I was confident that she wasn't at somebody's house. She wasn't at a friend's house.”
Merrill says that she and her kids are fairly new to the area, “so everyone that she had established relationships to, she had met in September. That network of friends... is very limited also, so it wasn't hard to exhaust that fairly quickly.
“Every single child that I've spoken to, that's the one thing they come back to is she was talking to this man online,” she says.
Ella is believed to have met the man on a social media platform called Omegle, Merrill says. Omegle gained popularity among teens during the COVID-19 pandemic. The site shut down in November, according to KING 5.
"It's like a roulette. It just matches you with random people,” Merrill tells Inside Edition Digital. “Then once you make a connection, you generally move off into another platform.”
Ella left her phone at her home but took many belongings, leading friends and family to think this disappearance was planned.
“She did take a fair amount of stuff with her, implying that she thought she was going somewhere. She took things [like] blow dryers and clothes and her crochet stuff, so she was thinking she was going somewhere safe, was the impression that I got, and she left with enough stuff that I don't believe she just walked off. I think someone picked her up. She had two or three bags. Enough that it would be really difficult to just wander onto community transit by herself, or make it to a neighborhood friend, or something like that,” Merrill says.
Merrill says that she has been able to unlock her daughter's phone and get into some of her social media apps because many had the same password, however, she has been unable to get into some social media apps because the password is different. It's on these apps, Merrill says, that she believes Ella was speaking with the man.
The worried mom says that her daughter also “tipped” the home security cameras in a different position, so Ella leaving the house “wasn't caught on the front cameras. So that signifies that she went out a back window. It's first-story, so that wouldn't be hard to achieve.
Merrill "immediately [went] to all the neighbors [to] try to see if there was any footage on the Ring cameras in the area. Unfortunately, the way the neighborhood's set up, everyone's proximities were so short, that it wouldn't have caught anything," she continues.
What was also strange, Merrill says, is that Ella left a long note behind that was written in “uncharacteristically neat handwriting."
"It was just very clear that she wanted us to know that she loved us, and she didn't want to hurt us, and it just feels off," she says.
"She did say in the note, ‘I promise I'll come home one day,’ and it does read very similar to, maybe, a kid that was being groomed or convinced that they could be offered something else, or convinced that maybe they are a problem for people that they've never previously believed they were a problem for prior to that," Ella’s godmother, Kimberly Fierley, tells Inside Edition Digital.
“It doesn't read [like] a really typical runaway note, and she didn't really give a strong motivation for why, and she gave specific details of things to tell her little brother to remember her by, so it's a pretty heartbreaking note all around,” Fierley adds.
Her family remains focused on bringing her home. Ella’s father, who lives in Alaska, has come to Washington state to help search for his daughter. Ella's two older siblings and younger brother are coping the best they can in this situation. And her mother is hellbent on finding the missing teen.
“[Police] treated that as a runaway case. There wasn't much movement or traction for, I feel, far too long. There has not been great communication with it. They are actively pursuing leads and tips that I know of. We're trying to gather more communication and updates from them currently to try to keep that line of communication more open,” Merrill says. “I've also been in contact with departments all over the place. The area we live in, there's so many lines you cross. I've been in contact with, I think over five different police departments at this point.”
And so Ella’s family and friends have taken to social media, where they hope someone somewhere will see their videos and be able to spot the teen, wherever she is. The case has garnered significant interest, especially on TikTok, where Fierley has posted videos explaining what happened.
“I went, ‘Nobody else is going to run a TikTok page. Sarah's doing so many other things, I can make a TikTok,’” Fierley recalls. “I just got on there and made one, and honestly the video that went viral was literally me at 10:30 at night, sitting in my bedroom in the house with all the other kids outside the bedroom getting ready for bed, after we'd spent literally all day out posting flyers.
“My goal from the very beginning of this, was just to, one, speak from my heart, and, two, try and give the community something to hold onto, in reference of what areas we think she might have gone to, what they should be looking out for, and also to put out some of the social media names that we didn't know about, that looked like she was able to use them in a backdoor scenario, that I think may have put her at risk because there's a lot of other young women on there, and there's a lot of moms on there,” she says.
Fierley says that the engagement on the TikTok account “FindEllaJones” is 96% female. “Women have really bound together to spread the word, and now we have just people from all over asking us to send PDF flyers to them, going out on their days off and putting up flyers," she says.
Another family member created a GoFundMe so that they could fundraise to hire a private investigator.
Merrill has also taken a leave of absence from work to dedicate her time to finding Ella.
In a statement to Inside Edition Digital, the Mount Vernon Police Department says the case is "assigned to our Criminal Investigations Division with a Detective assigned to it. We are receiving a number of tips and are evaluating each of them on their own merits. Those that do have substantive information that we can follow up on, we are. We are asking the public that, if they do sight Ella, to call 911 immediately so officers can respond.”
Ella’s family just wants to the young girl home to be safe and sound.
“Every second counts with a missing child. So that was frustrating as her mother because I know something's really wrong. I absolutely do not believe that Ella wouldn't reach out. I just don't,” her mom says. “Ella is an amazing young woman, and she has an amazing, beautiful life ahead of her, and she has a ridiculous amount of people that love her, and feel her absence greatly. And we understand that she may be in a position where she can't reach out, but if that opportunity ever arises, there is not a single thing that has happened that could happen that would ever stop everybody from loving her and accepting her and bringing her home and helping her build the life that she deserves.”
“We love you. We're doing everything we can to try to get you home safe. It doesn't matter what is going on, just please come home,” her godmother pleads.
Anyone with information about Ella Jones's whereabouts should call Skagit County Dispatch at (360) 428-3211.
“I will say that there is an army of people that are filled with an extreme amount of rage. Ella has bonus uncles, Ella has bonus dads, she has bonus aunts and moms and everything else. And we realize that there are a lot of really bad individuals out there, and they're continuing to victimize girls, and none of us are going to stop,” Merrill says. “We're going to find out who she went with, we're going to find out where she went, and maybe we'll be lucky enough to rescue some other girls along the way, because we feel like the authority's hands are tied in a lot of things, but the families are here, and we're passionate, and we're not going to slow down.”
