“It’s the worst nightmare that you wish you could wake up from. And it just keeps going and going and going,” Lisa Damron told Dateline. “I just wanna know where my baby’s at. I just want my baby home.”
Lisa’s daughter, 13-year-old Stefanie Damron, has been missing from her New Sweden, Maine home since September 23. “She’s a wonderful girl,” Lisa said. “I can’t believe this is all happening.”
The day was like any other. Sometime in the early afternoon, Lisa went with her husband to fill out paperwork for a job application. Four of their six children, including Stefanie, stayed home with their grandfather. The Damron children are homeschooled.
“Before we left and stuff, she came up to me — was giving me love — and hugged me and told me she loved me and kissed me on the cheek,” Lisa remembered. “I kissed her back and told her I love her and, ‘I’ll be back.’”
Lisa says she began receiving text messages at around 3:00 p.m. from her eldest daughter that Stefanie had left the house. “Sometimes when, you know, she gets upset or just wants to be left alone, she would go out in the woods,” she said. “They went out looking for her and stuff. They couldn’t find her.”
According to Lisa, Stefanie had gotten into an argument with her older sister about chores before she ran off. “They were arguing about who was gonna do what,” she explained.
After the argument, Stefanie went outside where her grandfather was doing maintenance work on the front door. “He said that she turned around, she looked back at him — she had tears in her eyes,” Lisa said. “And she turned around and just kept walking.”
Lisa says Stefanie then walked into the woods by the house, an area with which she was extremely familiar. There is a path through the area that leads to the main road. The family heard a vehicle pass by shortly after Stefanie ran off, although nobody saw it. “They do not know if it was a vehicle, a four-wheeler, a motorcycle or something,” she said. “By the time anybody got up there, the vehicle was already gone.”
Shortly after learning Stefanie had run off, Lisa headed home to help look for her. “I started looking for her, going up and down the roads and everything because, I mean, she has done this before,” she said.
Lisa told Dateline that there have been two other instances where Stefanie has run off — but not like this. “I’ve been able to find her the times she did it before, but this time I couldn’t find her,” she said.
Stefanie’s family reported her missing to the Maine State Police (MSP) the next day.
MSP Lieutenant Darrin Crane told Dateline the initial police response for Stefanie was extensive. “Several K-9 teams went very early on. We’ve also gone back with cadaver dogs,” he said. “We have talked to neighbors repeatedly — just seeing if they remember anything, or have heard anything, or saw anything suspicious that day or around that time frame.”
According to Lt. Crane, the MSP has done “several days’ worth of large-scale grid searching in the area” which he described as extremely dense. More recently, the start of winter has made searching more difficult. “That’s a hurdle for us,” the lieutenant said. “We will, when weather permits, continue to search the local area physically. That — we haven’t given up on that.”
According to Lt. Crane, the FBI offered their resources to the MSP not long after Stefanie went missing. “The Major Crimes Unit will continue to investigate the case in partnership with the FBI’s CARD team,” the MSP wrote on a Facebook post from November 2024. The CARD team is the FBI’s Child Abduction Rapid Deployment team which specializes in “cases where a child has been abducted by someone other than a family member.”
The FBI has listed Stefanie on their website, and is offering a reward of up to $15,000 “for information leading to the safe return of Stefanie Damron and/or information leading to the arrest and prosecution of anyone involved in her disappearance.”
Lieutenant Crane would not go into details of the investigation and says his department has not made a determination on whether foul play is involved in Stefanie’s disappearance. “The fact that we don’t know either where Stefanie is today or what happened to Stefanie, then we — we believe anything is still possible,” he told Dateline. “From an accident out in the woods to foul play — we’re taking it all serious and following up on any lead that points us in one direction or the other.”
Lisa Damron says the last few months have been agonizing wondering where Stefanie is. “I wished I knew to God where she was at because she wouldn’t be there,” she said. “She would be here at home where I know she’s safe.”
Stefanie is 5’0” and 130 lbs. She has green eyes and brown hair. She was last seen wearing blue jeans, a long-sleeved blue shirt, and black Harley Davidson hiking boots. Stefanie would be 14 years old today.
Anyone with information about Stefanie’s disappearance is asked to call the Maine State Police at 1-800-924-2261 or (207) 532-5400. You may also contact the FBI’s tipline at 1-800-CALL-FBI or you can submit a tip online at tips.fbi.gov.
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